East Ayrshire Council Arts and Museums service this week (12th April) purchased a painting by Robert Colquhoun, (1914-1962) and Robert Macbryde(1913-1966) thanks to the Kilmarnock Standard, who brought it to the attention of staff in a recent article highlighting the forthcoming Bonham’s sale in Edinburgh.

The painting entitled, “King” is a costume design for the popular Scottish ballet ‘Donald of the Burthens’ and was bought for £900.

For a time, Kilmarnock-born artist Robert Colquhoun was able to enjoy due recognition for his work but he was to die in relative obscurity in London. Whilst the people and landscape of Ayrshire remained an inspiration for his art throughout his career he chose to live in London, cutting himself off from his former life in pursuit of his art. As an excellent draughtsman and a prolific painter and printer of haunting and unsettling images, his contribution to post war art was on an international level.

Jason Sutcliffe, Museums Development Manager who bid for the work via telephone said, ‘I am delighted to have been able to purchase this on behalf of East Ayrshire Council. We have been keen to acquire works by him to add to our collection and we are really pleased to have secured ‘King’ for less than the estimate, it will be a valuable addition to our already significant collection of works by local artists.’

The Dick is currently hosting a double bill in the North Museum. Eleanor Allen Robertson (Glasgow Girl) and The Art of Ayrshire Needlework. Both include paintings and textiles. The Robertson show includes some of the most spectacular textiles in our collections - elaborately embroidered Chinese drapes and a beautiful Chinese wedding dress. The Art of Ayrshire Needlework includes outstanding examples of the Ayrshire craft but also some of our best loved paintings - works by the eminent Scottish artist Robert Gemmell Hutchison, by Andrew Law, leading 20th C Scottish portraitist from Crosshouse, and by the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - Sir John Everett Millais. Also a painting by Nicholas Elias, the 17th C Dutch artist who preceded Rembrandt as Amsterdam`s leading portrait painter!

Both of these shows are likely to appeal to similar audiences - exquisitely crafted textiles and charming, accessible paintings by leading artists.

The Colquhoun work was purchased with assistance from The National Fund for Acquisitions administered with Government funds by the National Museums of Scotland and will be on display in due course.

ENDS

NOTES TO THE EDITOR:

Robert Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock in 1914. He attended Kilmarnock Academy where he did well in all subjects but particularly so in art. When he was 15 financial pressures led his parents to withdraw him from school and enrol him on an apprenticeship. Fortunately however, his art teacher had recognised his remarkable talent and when he discovered that Colquhoun would not be returning to his classes, he determined not to let such talent go to waste. He set about organising financial support and so managed to persuade Colquhoun’s parents to allow him to return to school.

In 1933 Colquhoun embarked on training at Glasgow School of Art. It was here that he met Robert MacBryde, another young man from Ayrshire. The two Roberts became close friends and lifelong companions, living and working together for almost 30 years.

On graduating, the pair travelled to Italy and France together on a travelling scholarship only returning to Ayrshire upon the outbreak of war in 1939. MacBryde was deemed unfit for the armed forces in the initial medical examination but Colquhoun served briefly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Edinburgh. However, after collapsing on duty in 1941 he was invalided out of service. After this, they moved to London. Colquhoun had hopes of being commissioned as an official war artist but had to wait until 1944 until he was asked to produce a work to record women weaving army cloth.

In London, the two artists came into contact with the Neo-Romantics – a group of artists painting visionary and imaginative landscapes peopled with heroic figures. These paintings tended to have a sombre tone reflecting the mood during and following the two world wars. For a time, Colquhoun experimented with similar landscapes but by 1943 he had returned his attention to a focus on the figure.

It was around this time that he made the acquaintance of Wyndham Lewis and Jankel Adler. Their influence is evident in the angular style with which he began to paint his figures. Adler encouraged him to do away with models and to paint from his imagination and memory, freeing him to experiment with expressive ways of representing the figure.

In 1945 Colquhoun visited an exhibition of Picasso’s work at the Victoria and Albert and this inspired him to experiment with the kind of distortions and fragmentations typical in Picasso’s work.

The people Colquhoun painted are not happy people. They have a despairing and desolate look and appear isolated in some kind of personal suffering. The angular, distorted style he had developed gives his figures a sense of restriction and emotional detachment. Sometimes he painted faces to look like masks in a similar way to Picasso, with the effect of de-humanising the figures bringing a menacing element into his work. On occasions he included sinister looking or caged animals to represent some aspect of the human condition.

These paintings were very much about Colquhoun’s emotional and subjective response to the world and his subjects. He was a sensitive character and was deeply affected by the suffering of those he came into contact with, those affected by the poverty of the 1930s and the post war years. But his work also represents the general feeling of these years, he was amongst many artists who were striving to give voice to the prevailing sense of guilt and pessimism and a nihilistic view of the world.

Colquhoun apparently expressed this feeling well, people seem to have connected with his work and he enjoyed a period of considerable popularity in Europe as well as Britain during the 1940s. In 1943 he was given a one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery in London, his first of several. In 1946 he spent several weeks painting in Ireland and in 1948 he paid another visit to Italy. It was around this time he began producing monotype prints.

Throughout this successful period the two Roberts were based in London and here they made quite a reputation for themselves as bohemian, nationalistic Scots with their frequent heavy drinking sessions leading to raucous behaviour. As the decade drew to a close their success began to wane. Interest in Colquhoun’s work began to decline leading to financial difficulties. Under the strain this brought, their drinking habits seem to have worsened, with the inevitable negative impact on the quality and volume of work they produced.

Eventually they were forced to leave their London flat and for the next few years they moved around the South of England staying with friends. They sold little work during this time and so a commission to design costumes and scenery for a new Scottish Ballet “Donald of the Burthens” to be shown at Covent Garden in 1951 was very welcome. Colquhoun later worked alone on designs for a production of “King Lear”.

In 1958 the Whitechapel Gallery offered Colquhoun a retrospective exhibition and he set to work producing a number of new paintings for the show. It was fairly well received but after this time he was to produce very few more paintings. Instead he focused on monotypes and drawing and seems to have found some new inspiration in this. He was working towards an exhibition of his prints at the Museum Street Gallery when he collapsed and died of a heart attack in 1962, aged just 47.

For further information please contact Laura Brown, Audience Development Officer on 01563 578153 or Carol Keohone 01563 578154.