Archive Story: The Brahmin and the Mongoose

In 1957, Vivian Springford painted a small group of canvases that marked the true beginning of her mature practice. Titled The Brahmin and the Mongoose, these were her first fully abstract works — a threshold moment when she stepped away from portraiture and illustration into a new language of myth, gesture, and abstraction.

The story itself comes from Hindu folklore: a woman raises a child alongside a mongoose. One day she finds the animal with blood on its jaws, assumes it has harmed her son, and strikes it dead — only to learn that it had killed a cobra poised to attack the boy. On the surface, the tale warns against rash judgment. Beneath that, it speaks to an older truth: a caution against destroying the fierce, protective aspects of one’s own nature.

Springford translated this struggle into paint. On dark grounds, white strokes coil and lash across the surface, serpentine arcs twisting in opposition. There are no figures — no literal mongoose or cobra — only energy, distilled into gesture. The paintings capture conflict not as illustration but as revelation: an awakening enacted through motion.

In the context of her oeuvre, the importance of this series is unmistakable. It marks her first decisive break from figuration and her first engagement with Eastern narrative as a generative source. Everything that followed — the Calligraphy Paintings, the Rice Paper Mountings, the Chromatic Pools — traces back to this moment. The Brahmin and the Mongoose announced that Springford’s abstraction would not be formal play, but a field where myth, philosophy, and inner nature converge.

From this threshold, the trajectory of her career unfolds: the disciplined gesture of the calligraphic works, the aerial calm of the pools, the eruptions of the Expansionists, the portals of the Cosmos. All echo the revelation first enacted here — that painting could embody struggle and transformation at once. The mongoose and the cobra, locked in combat, prefigure the Taoist balance that would later define her vision: fierce and protective forces bound together in a single, eternal cycle.