[BITList] The two Roberts

[John Feltham]

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Colquhoun,  Robert  (1914-1962), painter, was born on 20 December 1914 at Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, the eldest child of Robert Colquhoun, an engineering fitter, and his wife, Janet Candlish. He was educated at Loanhead primary school and then transferred to Kilmarnock Academy in 1926 where his artistic ability was soon observed by James Lyle, his determined and dedicated art teacher. Colquhoun's father, responding to the severe economic pressures of the time, arranged for Robert to leave school at the age of fourteen to begin an engineering apprenticeship. On learning of the boy's departure, Lyle was concerned enough to persuade two wealthy benefactors to fund his return to school and prepare, with eventual success, for a scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art, which he entered possibly in 1932 but most probably in 1933. Here he met Robert MacBryde [see below], with whom he formed a tender and ultimately inseparable relationship.

Robert MacBryde  (1913-1966), painter , was born on 5 December 1913 at Weevers Vennel, Maybole, Ayrshire, the eldest child of John McBride and his wife, Agnes McKay. MacBryde's background was more humble than Colquhoun's. His father's meagre wage as an unskilled hide stripper in a tannery was supplemented by that of his mother, who sold reject fabric scraps from local mills. Having left school at fourteen, MacBryde found menial employment in a boot factory and a grocer's shop before entering the Glasgow School of Art at a similar time to Colquhoun.

While at art school Colquhoun and MacBryde were perceived as talented and conscientious students who, nevertheless-probably to obscure the intensity of their relationship-distanced themselves from the college's social life. Having taken studio accommodation opposite the school, they settled into a life of hard-working domesticity. Ian Fleming, their tutor and later a close friend, painted a large portrait of the two students in their Renfrew Street digs. He and Hugh Crawford, another influential teacher, directed their attention to French painting from the impressionists onwards. Both of the Roberts, as they became affectionately known, were especially influenced by Degas. Dedication to their work won them prizes for drawing and painting, enabling them to visit France on several college excursions. In 1938, having completed their studies, they were awarded post-diploma scholarships to study at the Patrick Allan Fraser School, near Arbroath, Angus, under the expert, but irritatingly dogmatic, tutelage of James Cowie.

Facing uncertain futures, both students had applied for Glasgow's much-coveted annual travelling scholarship. Colquhoun was the chosen recipient but, owing to concern that this might separate the unique working relationship, the chairman of the school's governors, Sir John Richmond, personally donated an equal sum to MacBryde, enabling the Roberts to tour Europe together for an indefinite period. They travelled through France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, visiting museums and galleries and continuing to paint and draw, occasionally under formal tuition such as at the Academie Julian in Paris, where, for a small fee, students attended life-drawing classes. Suddenly, it seemed, they could live together openly without the secrecy and restraint necessitated by Scottish puritanism. Shortly before war with Germany was declared in September 1939, the British government's call for all nationals in Europe to return to the United Kingdom prompted the Roberts' grudging return home.

Back in Kilmarnock, working from a shed in Colquhoun's grandparents' garden, the Roberts mounted an exhibition of works for sale, which gave them some much needed but short-lived income. Demoralized and in ill health, they maintained a penurious existence while anticipating the inevitable call up. Colquhoun reluctantly trained as an art teacher before being conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in July 1940. MacBryde, however, was exempted from military service when diagnosed as tubercular.

Distraught at their separation, MacBryde followed Colquhoun to Edinburgh and Leeds, living in lodgings near the military camps and lobbying on Colquhoun's behalf to procure a war artist's commission with the ultimate hope of securing his release. A mutual friend introduced MacBryde to the author and editor Cyril Connolly, and to Peter Watson, the wealthy art patron with whom Connolly was planning to found the magazine Horizon. Proffering help, Watson offered MacBryde accommodation at his luxurious London apartment. Colquhoun, his mental and physical health deteriorating, suffered a collapse in February 1941 and was medically discharged from the army. Pausing only to collect a few belongings from Kilmarnock, he immediately set out to join MacBryde in London during the height of the blitz.

Initially Watson's influence was considerable. Not only were many established artists friends of his, including Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland (several of whose works adorned his walls), but he also introduced them to his younger painter-proteges John Craxton, Lucian Freud, and John Minton, soon to become friends of the Roberts. Following his arrival in London, Colquhoun suffered a creative block, while MacBryde relentlessly attempted to secure a foothold in London's art world. During an autumn sojourn in Worcestershire, a re-energized Colquhoun painted three landscapes influenced by Samuel Palmer, while MacBryde, affronted by English indifference to Scottish culture, began planning a show of work by Scottish artists, including their own.

The critically successful exhibition 'Six Scottish Artists' opened in May 1942 at the prestigious Lefevre Gallery, and this began a fertile association between the gallery and the two Roberts, who exhibited there together in 1943, 1944, and 1949, with Colquhoun showing separately in 1947 and 1950. In 1943 the critic Robert Melville described Colquhoun as 'the most promising young painter England [sic] has produced for a considerable time'  (R. MelvilleThe Listener, 17 June 1943, 721). In 1947 Wyndham Lewis, reviewing Colquhoun's work, stated that he was 'recognised as one of the best-perhaps the best-of the young artists' while maintaining that Colquhoun's and MacBryde's work was 'almost identical' and 'one artistic organism'  (LewisThe Listener, 13 Feb 1947).

After their arrival in London the Roberts' early success afforded them an introduction to a broad spectrum of the capital's artistic community. Both were seen as alluring, charismatic figures whose engaging personalities and physical appearances, though distinctly different, quickly charmed most of those with whom they came into contact. MacBryde, the shorter of the two, exhibited an extrovert, animated, and gregarious personality that perfectly complemented the withdrawn, and occasionally menacing, animus of the tall and saturnine Colquhoun. Their success facilitated a move to 77 Bedford Gardens in Kensington, a studio apartment which rapidly became a noisily boisterous venue for a bohemian coterie. Friends attending their regular weekend soirees included Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, and Michael Ayrton. The painter John Minton briefly lived with the Roberts for a time but growing emotional tension forced his departure.

In 1943 the Polish emigre artist Jankel Adler entered the Roberts' lives, having occupied the studio above theirs. A friend of Picasso and Georges Braque and a teaching colleague of Paul Klee, Adler was a living link with the European cosmopolitanism from which the war had isolated the Roberts. His profoundly metaphysical approach to art endowed him with a guru-like status. He encouraged both men to paint from imagination, not observation, advice heeded especially by Colquhoun. Prior to meeting Adler, their chosen subjects had been landscape and still life, but, in future, MacBryde would introduce figures into his increasingly formal still-life compositions while Colquhoun concentrated almost exclusively on the figure. Although the Roberts were perceived as pivotal to British neo-romanticism, European influences on their work, strengthened by seeing the large post-war Picasso exhibition in London, helped them to avoid some of the mawkish excesses of this style. Braque's growing influence on MacBryde's work can be clearly identified as he gradually moved away from the painterly still lifes of the early 1940s to the formally decorative compositions of later years.

Oil paint had been the Roberts' preferred medium since art school days and was to remain so throughout their artistic careers, though both drew extensively with pencil and pen. As their creative repertory developed, they began to use other media such as lithography and monoprinting. Colquhoun, always more artistically daring than MacBryde, also worked in watercolours, chalk, and crayon. Both were adept colourists. MacBryde, as befitted his subject matter of still lifes (mostly fruit and vegetables), employed an evocatively Mediterranean palette, counterpoising Hellenic blues with terracottas, lemon yellows, and pimento reds. Colquhoun's colours, though never sombre, were more muted: acidic yellows were contrasted against bottle greens and burgundy reds-'the colours of tartan', as they were once described.

Colquhoun's work particularly, with its stylized figures frozen in hieratic gestures, personified and appealed to the pervasive angst engendered by the war. Wyndham Lewis, his admirer, described it as existential and seemingly to have 'a grave dug behind all ... [the] canvasses'  (LewisThe Listener, 23 Oct 1947, 736). Two paintings of 1946, Woman with a Bird Cage and The Fortune Teller, represent Colquhoun's creative zenith. His artistic influence can be seen in the work of several contemporary artists such as William Scott, Michael Rothenstein, Keith Vaughan, and, more specifically, John Minton. Although some of Colquhoun's subjects, such as The Beggar or Grieving Women, might imply sentimentalism, the dry passion and puritanical dignity of his subjects confounds any such criticism. His work was dominated by female figures which were often inspired by family memories, though paintings such as The Two Students and The Lovers are thinly disguised, imaginative portraits of the Roberts themselves. Following a visit to Ireland, Colquhoun experimented with monoprinting, a rarely used medium which he made very much his own. By 1948 successful exhibitions, appearances in fashionable magazines, and the purchase by the Museum of Modern Art in New York of a major work by each of them made the Roberts' success appear boundless. In reality, however, MacBryde's compulsive jealousy was endangering their relationship. Alcohol consumption, initially a convivial pursuit, was now a chronic necessity, and, more ominously, reviews of Colquhoun's work signalled a possible waning of the emotional infusion apparent in earlier, acclaimed works.

About this time the Roberts were evicted from their studio home. Two eccentric sisters, Frances Byng-Stamper and Caroline Lucas, offered them accommodation at Miller's Press, their print studio in Lewes, Sussex. This initiated for the two men a fruitful period of lithographic printmaking. Colquhoun was commissioned to illustrate a book on Italy to be written by their friend, the poet George Barker; however, the book was never published. While they were abroad, in 1949, Duncan MacDonald, their champion at the Lefevre Gallery, died. When Colquhoun returned he held an exhibition of work of Italian subjects. The show proved a failure and the gallery terminated the relationship. The Roberts never again established a similar partnership with a gallery, though the Redfern spasmodically exhibited their works throughout the 1950s.

Homeless again, the Roberts were housed by the writer Elizabeth Smart at Tilty Mill, her country home in Essex, where they acted as surrogate parents to her four children. Out of favour and alcoholic, their decline seemed inevitable. At Kenneth Clark's suggestion, however, they were commissioned to design sets and costumes for Donald of the Burthens, a ballet based on a Scottish myth and choreographed by Leonide Massine. Their designs were favourably reviewed, but Colquhoun's later attempt at theatrical work for a production of King Lear, starring Michael Redgrave, elicited a tepid response. Embittered by the lack of a public commission for the Festival of Britain in 1951, Colquhoun practically forsook painting in favour of works on paper. However, in 1953 he produced Figures in a Farmyard (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), possibly his largest and most complex painting, and a work of powerful creativity and intense expressionism.

In 1954 Smart, unable to continue to fund the Roberts' inebriated lifestyle, abandoned Tilty, rendering the Roberts homeless once more. Adrift, they moved from one cheap lodging to another. An honourable attempt to revive Colquhoun's stagnating talent was made in 1958 by Bryan Robertson, director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, when he offered to stage a large retrospective. Although the exhibition was respectfully reviewed, Colquhoun's attempt to produce several fashionably large canvases for it was ill received. In 1959 the Roberts again lived in East Anglia, at Kersey in Suffolk, where a short television film was made about them by Ken Russell. Ultimately, the lure of Soho pub life proved irresistible, and they relocated in London, where they were increasingly viewed as two tiresome and occasionally violent alcoholics whose moment of glory was long past. Their last joint exhibition was held in 1959 at the Kaplan Gallery, demonstrating that, given the opportunity, both of them were capable of working assiduously. Colquhoun's health had suffered from years of alcoholic excess and self-neglect, and in the early hours of the morning of 20 September 1962, while working in rooms above the Museum Street Gallery for an exhibition shortly to be held there, he suffered a heart attack and died in MacBryde's arms. MacBryde insisted that the exhibition should be held, and when it opened a fortnight later the work, mostly monotypes, testified to Colquhoun's technical virtuosity and emotional profundity. He was buried in his home town of Kilmarnock.

Generously funded by Francis Bacon, a distraught MacBryde visited Spain before moving to Ireland, where, drifting aimlessly, he worked briefly as a barman and art teacher, latterly sharing an apartment with the poet Patrick Kavanagh. On the night of 6 May 1966, as he left a Dublin pub, he was knocked down in the street in a road accident and died as a result of his injuries. Like Colquhoun, his body was returned to Scotland and he was buried in his birthplace of Maybole. Their friend George Barker wrote a moving eulogy for MacBryde, as he had done earlier for Colquhoun.

Works by Colquhoun and MacBryde are included in many public collections throughout Great Britain. In addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Colquhoun is represented in other American galleries, as well as in Canada and Australia. The National Portrait Gallery in London has a self-portrait in pencil of Colquhoun and a portrait of MacBryde. Other self-portraits, and portraits the artists did of each other, are in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Ian Fleming's large double portrait of the Roberts as art students is owned by the Glasgow School of Art.

Roger Bristow 

Sources  J. Rothenstein, Modern English painters [3rd edn], 3 vols. (1984) + R. Melville, 'June art exhibitions', The Listener (17 June 1943), 721 [review] + [W. Lewis], 'Round the art galleries', The Listener (13 Feb 1947) [review] + [W. Lewis], 'Round the art exhibitions', The Listener (23 Oct 1947), 736 [review] + Robert Colquhoun (1958) [exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Gallery, London, March-May 1958] + private information (2004) + Secretary and treasurer's correspondence, 1940, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
Likenesses  R. Colquhoun, pen and ink, 1938 (Robert MacBryde), NPG · J. Laurie, double portrait, pencil and chalk drawing, 1939 (with Robert MacBryde), Scot. NPG · R. MacBryde, black chalk drawing, 1939, Scot. NPG · R. Colquhoun, self-portrait, c.1940, Scot. NPG [see illus.] · R. Colquhoun, self-portrait, pencil, NPG · I. Fleming, double portrait, Glasgow School of Art




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