Collins was a visionary British artist who some see an an heir to William Blake. His paintings and prints are filled with Christian symbols that represent the various battlegrounds between good and evil, light and dark. I think these works are small and relatively unassuming in scale. However, they are complete and in them, Cecil Collins has created his own world that eventually, we have to enter on his terms. I'm reminded of other near contemporaries: the poet Christopher Smart and the composer Benjamin Britten. Samuel Palmer would fit in here too. There's this whole strain of thought in these artists that to me seems clearly British and it displays a concern for nothing less than our souls in intimate and awesome scale.
