In 1949, the National Cash Register Company decided to commission a mural painting for the main entrance hall in their new factory in Dundee. They asked the Royal Society of Arts to organise a competition to find a suitable work. The subject set for the panel was The Scottish Scene and entrants were free to embody any theme of their choice, within the overall framework of the Scottish Scene. From the designs submitted, fifty were selected for an exhibition which opened in London and toured venues in Scotland before closing in Belfast. Kelp Gathering was Colquhoun’s unsuccessful entry for the competition. Although Colquhoun had established her reputation in the late 1920s-early 1930s as a painter of figure compositions (including her prize-winning Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, 1929, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1931), by the time Kelp Gathering was painted figures had all but disappeared from her compositions. Instead, she was busy pursuing her occult research and experimenting with the automatic painting techniques she had learned from the surrealists. As well as being unusual in this respect, Kelp Gathering, with its depiction of rural poverty, is one of the few (if not the only) paintings of any period that engages in social comment. Despite its leanings towards figuration, the painting nevertheless includes many surrealist techniques. In a marginal note to a full size watercolour study for this work in the Tate archives, Colquhoun listed: “Textiles. creels: vertical comage (fine); tweeds: diagonal comage (fine); kelp: coarse comage; grass: fine comage; fur, hair: decalcomania; rocks, stones: grattage”. This painting remained in the artist’s possession until 1986 when it was acquired by the art dealer Victor James. In an email to Richard Shillitoe dated 13 March 2011, he wrote: “I visited the artist in 1986 and purchased the painting from her then. I wanted to buy an oil and she had little to sell but fished this picture out from behind a cupboard! It looked as if it had been there for many years. She told me it had been done or inspired by a trip to Donegal, but did not give it a specific title. I subsequently sold it, which I now regret, to a gallery in Bath, who I think then consigned it in 1988 to Christies.”