Eric Robertson is a fascinating figure in Scottish art, and his works very rarely come onto the market. A vital member of the Edinburgh Group, Robertson was part of a loose association of fellow artists and friends, including his wife, the artist and illustrator Cecile Walton, who organised a series of progressive exhibitions in the Scottish capital from 1912 until 1921.
These exhibitions gained considerable exposure and provoked lively critical debate: “we find undoubted signs of energy in place of ennui,” one reviewer noted, while another observed that,
“people look to the Edinburgh Group… for something unique rather than universal; for something of pagan brazenness rather than parlour propriety. Half of Edinburgh goes secretly desiring to be righteously shocked, and the other half goes feeling deliciously uncertain it may be disappointed by not finding anything sufficiently shocking.”
Robertson himself attracted some of this notoriety, both for his bold, expressive paintings and his complicated personal life. Originally a pupil of John Duncan, he appears to have fallen out of favour with the older artist due to his suggestive, rather than strictly classical, treatment of the nude.
During the First World War, Robertson served in France with the Friends’ Ambulance Service, returning to this subject afterwards to complete larger-scale paintings. His work reveals an artist of great imagination, balancing decoration, desire, and introspection, a painter whose work sits at the heart of one of the most compelling and unconventional chapters in early 20th-century Scottish art.
