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Marion Adnams:
Study for The Twins, 1955
Unmounted (ref: 10259)

Pencil across two sheets of paper

Tags: Marion Adnams pencil animals study

Provenance: The Artist's Estate

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, et al. Women Only Works on Paper. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p. 76.

From her earliest work, Adnams played with discrepancies of scale and the creation of unlikely narratives in a surrealist way. She recorded that ‘When I first went to see René Magritte at the Tate I saw him for the first time and I nearly passed out. So often the same thought had been with me”.

In 1930, Adnams started attending life classes at Derby School of Art. She was gratified to find her natural ability to draw recognised, though perhaps less so in the terms her talent was acknowledged, with one teacher remarking, ‘she drew like a man, direct, with no rubbing out’. The ornamental dogs featured in the pencil drawing Study of two Staffordshire Dogs were from Adnams’ own collection of Staffordshire pottery. The addition of a piece of paper to the left-hand side, suggests that having at first intended to draw only one of the pair, Adnams felt a compulsion to unite it with its companion.

The Staffordshire Dogs featured in this pencil drawing were from Adnams own collection.

 Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark inscribed on the reverse:

 'In winter or summer, 'twas always the same—. You could never meet either alone'.