Lot 51
ROBERT MACBRYDE (BRITISH 1913-1966) §
A WEE GLASGOW BUDDY
Auction: MODERN MADE | Lots 1 - 422 | Fri 01 May at 10am
Description
signed (lower left), oil on canvas
Dimensions
76.2cm x 101.5cm (30in x 40in)
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the original owner;
Christie's, Edinburgh, The Scottish Sale, 28 October 1999, lot 277;
Christie's, Edinburgh, The Scottish Sale, 28 October 2004, lot 266 [as A Wee Glasgow Boy] where acquired by the present owner.
Footnote
Robert MacBryde was a son of Maybole in Ayrshire near the south-west coast of Scotland. He trained at Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s, where he met his life partner Robert Colquhoun. They undertook post-graduate courses at Hospitalfield near Arbroath and went on a joint travelling scholarship in Europe in 1938 to 1939. A move to London during the Second World War resulted in the ‘Two Roberts’ becoming key figures in the capital’s art scene, socialising with artists including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and becoming neighbours with Jankel Adler.
Nicknamed ‘McBraque’ and ‘McPicasso’, MacBryde and Colquhoun were amongst the avant-garde who digested the pioneering approaches of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and others amongst the most progressive European artists of the era, to create paintings in their own unique style. A Wee Glasgow Buddy is an impressive example of MacBryde’s distinctive exploration not only of portraiture, but also of the still life and interior genres.
Perhaps harking back to friendships with the gregarious citizens of the city where he emerged as an artist, the present painting reveals MacBryde’s distinctive simplification of form, suggestion of the enigmatic emotional life of his subjects and intense, artificially lit environments in which narrative is suggested but not explained. As Patrick Elliott has explained about the pair: ‘Between 1946 and 1950 they were among the brightest stars of the contemporary art scene … By the early 1950s they were alcoholics and their work and reputations suffered.’ (See Ed. Alice Strang, A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950, Edinburgh, 2017, p.84)
This stardom and its associated tragedy was explored in the recent exhibition Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders staged at Charleston in Lewes and is the subject of the award-winning novel, The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr which was published last year.
