It sounds like the start of a bad joke, and whilst there is certainly silliness in the answer, it is quite the opposite.

If you haven’t guessed it yet, the answer is surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and her groundbreaking painting Old Maids.

In Old Maids, 1947, a kitchen table is surrounded by ladies sharing high tea with a monkey and five magpies.

With no prior research or knowledge of the work, I look at this painting and simply see girlhood. I see a fun, playful scene of friendship.

Rather than seeing a group of old maids, I see a party I want to be part of.

Now eager for more, I listen to three women talk of the painting via the Sharing Stories audio tour hosted on the Smartify app. I hear from the voice of a practitioner, someone with lived experience, and a specialist.

“Whatever you are feeling inside when you see the painting, is correct, because it is about the experience,” says Wiccan high priestess Lucia Segura. I felt validated to simply enjoy the piece in the moment, rather than risk the magic being lost through extensive explanation.

Artist Anj Smith tells me: “I think she is proposing a very different world order and comment on what it feels like to occupy a time and a space in her work.”

In the painting, small groups of women appear to be gossiping or sharing secrets. Carrington rejects the “ideals of youth and beauty that dominate both contemporary culture and most of the history of Western painting”, states art historian Whitney Chadwich.

The humble table features throughout Leonora Carrington’s work, and themes of fertility, ageing, the occult, and culinary practice arise. After all, someone’s kitchen table can say a lot about them (mine - with various cup stains as I have not grown up enough to remember to use the coasters I own, and always a bunch of flowers - it’s the rule).

Interested in collapsing the boundaries between humans, animals and food, Carrington portrays humans returning to primal behaviours in varying degrees of abjection and blasphemy in much of her work.

Old Maids displays a humorous approach to breaking down these boundaries using “the daintily draped table typical of bourgeois households” which “has been slyly re-envisioned as a non-hierarchical meeting ground between women, their animal familiars, and the celestial realms”, says author Susan Aberth.

According to the Urban Dictionary, an ‘old maid’ is “a woman who has passed the age at which women typically marry.”

No longer desired in society, Carrington, an apparent girl’s girl, repeatedly bolsters these spinster women through her work.

Which raises the point of why, 77 years later, are we still tending to believe this notion that a woman needs a partner to be happy, needs to find someone to marry in order to be desired by the conventions of society?

The detailed wit shown in Carrington’s paintings carries through in her words.

She said: “The idea that old masters are right and must be loved, honoured, and obeyed, is one of the most destructive lies that has ever been instilled in the female psyche.

“If women remain passive, I think there is very little hope for the survival of life on this earth.”

One more time for those at the back?

There is a wonderful feeling of magic and fantasy in the work, as well as a feeling in the painting that these women are witch-like. But despite witches being feared, ousted, and murdered throughout history, Carrington seems to depict these women with such playful joy.

Those women seen drowning were simply clever women, feared for this strangeness (because a clever woman surely had something odd about her, right?), and their label of ‘witch’ became derogatory, just like “old maid”.

Thankfully, the ‘witch’ term has been reclaimed by youthful feminists, and a little magic, creativity and obscurity has become a beautiful form of girlhood.

The minimal object labels in the Living Area of the Sainsbury Centre, where Old Maids hangs, is intentionally purposeful. As a visitor you are invited to enjoy the collection as Robert and Lisa Sainsbury did in their home, through your own personal eyes, with joy and pleasure rather than being directed by description.

Has Leonora Carrington’s Old Maids, come to be interpreted differently in the eyes of the 21st century viewer?

I personally wouldn’t mind joining in this high tea.