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Lot Essay
In 1947 Collins published The Vision of the Fool, in which he featured a group of thirty-one paintings and drawings together with a Preface, written in 1944, setting out the aims of his art: the quest for 'Great Happiness'.
Collins (op. cit., pp. 24-26) wrote, 'The reality and significance of the Fool, and of the poetic imagination of Art, is that it is the principal of personalizing life, of individualizing life; as against the most active principle of our time, which is the depersonalizing, deindividualizing of all life, and its destruction by the abstraction of mechanization ... The Saint, the artist, the poet, and the Fool, are one. They are the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light'.
Collins (op. cit., pp. 24-26) wrote, 'The reality and significance of the Fool, and of the poetic imagination of Art, is that it is the principal of personalizing life, of individualizing life; as against the most active principle of our time, which is the depersonalizing, deindividualizing of all life, and its destruction by the abstraction of mechanization ... The Saint, the artist, the poet, and the Fool, are one. They are the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light'.