Robert Colquhoun

Robert Colquhoun (20 December 1914 – 20 September 1962) was a Scottish painter, printmaker and theatre set designer.

Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock and was educated at Kilmarnock Academy. He won a scholarship to study at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met Robert MacBryde with whom he established a lifelong romantic relationship and professional collaboration, the pair becoming known as "the two Roberts". Both studied with James Cowie at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath.

In the summer of 1938 Colquhoun and MacBryde set off on a travelling scholarship to France and Italy. Whilst in Paris they met up with their friend from Arbroath, the Irish realist painter Patrick Hennessy also on a similar scholorship. The three travelling south together that autumn slowly by train to Marseille and some months later to Genoa and Rome.

Colquhoun served as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. After being injured, he returned to London in 1941 where he shared studio space with MacBryde. The pair shared a house with John Minton and, from 1943, Jankel Adler.

Colquhoun's early works of agricultural labourers and workmen were strongly influenced by the colours and light of rural Ayrshire. His work developed into a more austere, Expressionist style, heavily influenced by Picasso, and concentrated on the theme of the isolated, agonised figure. George Barker, Elizabeth Smart and Dylan Thomas – and were renowned for their parties at their studio (77 Bedford Gardens). Colquhoun was also a prolific printmaker, producing a large number of lithographs and monotypes throughout his career.

During and after the Second World War he worked with MacBryde on several set designs. These included sets for Gielgud's Macbeth, King Lear at Stratford and Massine's Scottish ballet Donald of the Burthens, produced by the Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1951. During the 1950s their artistic reputation went into serious decline, and their heavy drinking made any serious effort to paint impossible. According to their friend Anthony Cronin they were often close to destitution.

In May 1958, his work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, England.

Robert Colquhoun died, an alcoholic, in relative obscurity in London in 1962. MacBryde moved to Dublin, where he was killed in a traffic accident in 1966. Their friend Anthony Cronin describes them with respect and affection in his memoir Dead as Doornails.

Works Mysterious Figures (1960) Woman with Leaping Cat (1945)