£5,250
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture | 692
Auction: Evening Sale
Indistinctly signed, oil on canvas
Provenance: Acquired from the artist by his niece and thence by descent to the present owner.
Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson first became involved with Edinburgh’s artistic circles while in the early years of an architecture degree. After his studies were interrupted due to illness he transferred to a painting course at the Royal Institute, and later attended Edinburgh College of Art. He earned a reputation as a student of prodigious talent, though some deemed his work controversial: for instance, his drawing of a nude woman was removed from a student exhibition at The Scottish Gallery as it was deemed ‘immoral’. By 1913 he was exhibiting with an artists collective known as the Edinburgh Group. Another leading member was the artist Cecile Walton, whom Robertson would later marry.
Robertson was a prolific writer of letters and diaries. Early notes reveal a particular concern with landscape painting, and he strove to cultivate a palette that would evoke a fresh quality of light without succumbing to banality of colour. He sought inspiration throughout Scotland, and found Barra, Eriskay and Iona particularly stimulating. In 1916 Robertson joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, and would remain in France until the end of the War. Cecile Walton posted him copies of the Vorticist journal Blast, and these influenced Robertson’s wartime and post-war output. Even while stationed in France he painted whenever he could, generally producing modernist landscapes. While Robertson’s depiction of the Grampian mountains is representational, the use of simplified form and heightened tone lends the piece a distinctly modern quality.
In 1919 Robertson returned to Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Group re-convened. A 1920 exhibition at the New Gallery on Shandwick Place was received to great acclaim; a review in The National Outlook observed that ‘we have found the creative impulse at work… Half of Edinburgh goes to Shandwick Place secretly desiring to be righteously shocked, and the other half goes feeling deliciously uncertain it may be disappointed by not finding anything sufficiently shocking.’ In 1923 Robertson re-married and moved to Liverpool, where his artistic output dwindled. In 1943 he died of tuberculosis. Today, he is remembered for his accomplished figural compositions and modernist-inflected landscapes.