22 October 2025
Alice Strang
The appearance on the market, from Gordon and Ursula Bowyer’s collection, of Robert Colquhoun’s Woman Winding Wool and Hebridean Woman with Robert MacBryde’s Emotional Cornish Woman, provides an important opportunity to appreciate the achievements of the ‘Two Roberts’, as they were affectionately known, when the Scotsmen were at the peak of their careers and were the toast of 1940s London.
Colquhoun and MacBryde met in 1933 as students at Glasgow School of Art. Their lifelong bond developed so quickly that they were awarded a joint travelling scholarship five years later. However, the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted their artistic development. MacBryde was declared medically unfit, whilst Colquhoun served under a year with the Royal Army Medical Corps before being invalided out.
In the meantime, MacBryde had achieved an entrée into London’s art world and they moved within the contemporary art collector and patron Peter Watson in the English capital in 1941. They quickly became friends with artists including Francis Bacon, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, John Minton and Keith Vaughan, as well as habitués of the pubs and clubs of Soho. Their work was shown in group, joint and solo exhibitions throughout the 1940s including at the progressive Lefevre Gallery. Paintings by Colquhoun were acquired by the Contemporary Art Society and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which became the Arts Council of Great Britain) in 1942.
This extraordinary professional and personal success was accompanied by a move to a studio at 77 Bedford Gardens in Notting Hill in 1943, where the Polish artist Jankel Adler soon became a neighbour. He was a living link to the European avant-garde, having known Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. As Patrick Elliott has explained: “Adler advised the Roberts to examine their Scottish, Celtic roots, a notion which may have inspired Colquhoun’s depictions of Scottish women” as seen in Hebridean Woman. (Patrick Elliott, The Two Roberts, Edinburgh, 2014, p.29). Indeed, all three paintings presented here date from this remarkably creative period in the artists’ careers. They confronted the realities of existence with gravitas, often through an abstracted figuration realised by way of textured paint surfaces, a shared earthy palette and working from their imaginations rather than a model. Key subject matter included women observed absorbed in a task or used to embody an emotional state.
As Elliott has explained, the Roberts transformed from members of the neo-romantic movement into “stars in their own right” from 1946, not least with the selection of their work, including MacBryde’s Emotional Cornish Woman, in the British Council’s UNESCO-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris (it was lent by the twenty-three year old Gordon Bowyer). The British Council purchased a still life by MacBryde, whilst another became the first work of his to enter a public collection when it was acquired by Manchester Art Gallery in 1947. International reputations were secured with a joint exhibition at the George Dix Gallery in New York in 1948 which led to the acquisition of a work by each for the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Later that year and at the peak of their fame, they moved to Suffolk and speedily declined into penury and professional neglect in the 1950s.
With the recent publication of the novel The Two Roberts by award-winning author Damian Barr and the current exhibition of their work that he has curated at Charleston in Lewes (on until 12 April 2026), the Two Roberts are once more the toast of the town.
