Natural History Museum of the Child

John Melville (1902-1982) was a self-taught artist associated with the Surrealist movement, who pursued a uniquely personal vision. The composition of this painting is dream-like and uncanny, with human bodies and sinuous plant forms merging together and thrown into a kind of vortex. One reading of the work could be that Melville has made manifest the vivid fantasy world of the child as a kind of ‘museum of the subconscious’. For the Surrealists, nature was a byword for the marvellous, wild and instinctual, which could never be fully tamed or mastered by humankind. They rejected what they saw as the artificial division of humans and animals, perceiving nature as continuous with the human mind.