Morris would continue to work with surrealist themes throughout his life. His main career was as a zoologist, and through that a television celebrity from the 1950s to the 1990s. Natural forms and processes continued to fascinate him in his art.

The Mysterious Gift was painted on a reversed canvas, a favoured technique of his friend Francis Bacon. It’s an unusual painting by Morris. At first glance it appears to be a still life, but what is actually depicted is ambiguous. Morris says, ‘you should never ask an artist to explain the meaning of his paintings. When I look painting I let it speak directly to my eyes and I do not try to analyse it with words.’

Ten years older than Desmond Morris, Walter Poole had been away in the RAF during the war. Before the war he’d studied at the Swindon School of Art, and he was lucky during the war - his artistic skill was noticed and he was sent to continue his studies at Newcastle School of Art.

This painting was made while studying at Newcastle. Before being introduced to Surrealism, Poole was already interested in exploring psychological depth in his paintings. Each of the three women in this painting seems to be thinking something different. They seen vulnerable and alone, even though they are together. Poole has left the subject and the meaning of the painting ambiguous, for the viewer to decide.

Poole continued to return to Swindon during and after the war. He created a number of moody studies of the town and its surroundings. Another example painted shows the aircraft factory at Blunsdon. It’s on display in our Changing Identities gallery. Both show the influence of the depictions of ruined buildings made during the war by John Piper.

Poole returned to the South West for good in 1952. He opened the Fimbarrus Gallery in Bath, the first gallery specialising in contemporary art outside London. After this he concentrated on promoting others work, rather than developing his own.

When asked in 1937 if he was a Surrealist, Wadsworth said, ‘without hesitation ... I am not.’ Yet he greatly admired one of the pioneers of Surrealism, Giorgio di Chirico, and was exposed to Surrealist art while living in Paris during the 1920s.

His initial training in engineering, then in drawing by Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art, led him towards extreme precision in his art. His work during the First World War designing dazzle camouflage for ships explored changing perceptions of reality.

Brights Intervals is one of several marine still lifes by Wadsworth. Its primary colours are made more vivid by using tempera on a white ground, and the strange juxtaposition of objects give the work a surrealistic sense of altered reality.

From the beginning of his career, Collins work was mystical and visionary. He was influenced by William Blake and Samuel Palmer, but also, after visiting Paris in 1933, by the strange, visionary forms in the work of Paul Klee. The art critic Herbert Read invited him to exhibit in the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

When the British surrealists realised that Collins was committed to a Christian spiritual path, they ejected him. The surrealists in Britain rejected religious and political commitment. Undeterred, Collins continued to create his distinctive vision of the world. The Sibyl shows an oracle who evokes the fruitfulness of nature.

Simon Burton’s work explores one of the key themes of Surrealism, that of the unconscious mind and our dreams. At the time that the original Surrealist movement was current, between the 1910s and 30s, the study of dreams and psychological states as a science was relatively new. Today, modern psychology is one of many ideas that artists can draw upon, but Burton’s art has a mysterious, numinous quality that could take us into a dream-like state.

The girl in the painting has her eyes closed. Is she the one who is dreaming? Or are we witnessing a dream that includes her? Burton’s painting is deliberately ambiguous, allowing the viewer to make their own interpretations.

In the Losing and Finding series Linda Ingham made a highly personal exploration of her own psychological state. These were the first pieces she made after her mother’s death. She photographed herself without make-up, eyes closed, thinking of her mother. She then used the photographs to create the drypoints and then further explored her feelings about her mother in watercolour and pencil on the prints.

Nicola Tyson is known for her paintings, photography, books and spoken word performances. Her work has been described as ‘psycho figuration’ exploring gender, identity and sexuality. This gives her work an unsettling, almost surreal, quality: mix of the familiar and the unknown. When she started out as artist, she was influenced by feminist theory, but as her work developed she began to work more intuitively, saying, ‘I had found my voice — which I felt was a feminist achievement in itself — and no longer wanted my imagination to be structured by theory.’

This drawing shows a figure who seems to meet our gaze, perhaps exploring the idea of the male gaze - men looking at people they desire. Here, the model looks back.