Robert Colquhoun

Lefevre Gallery, London
Private Collection, U.K.

The canvas is unlined. There is a tiny indentation to the canvas in the upper left quadrant. There are two tiny spots of paint loss which coincide with the indentation in the upper left quadrant. Otherwise the paint surface is in good overall condition. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals a tiny spot of retouching in the lower left quadrant. Held in a simple wooden gilded frame with a canvas slip which has sustained some minor abrasions.
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Born in Kilmarnock in 1914, Colquhoun was the son of an engineering fitter and his wife. After an education at the local primary school, Colquhoun would have left his secondary education to work, had his supportive art teacher not rallied members of the local community to help fund his education. The effort paid off when Colquhoun won a scholarship to Glasgow School of Art in 1932. There he met Robert MacBryde whom he lived with the following year. 'The Two Roberts', as they became known, were immediately inseparable. They visited Paris together in their holidays, where the avant garde emphasis on form and colour heavily influenced the young men, and despite arguments which would sometimes become violent, they remained together for thirty years until Colquhoun's death in 1962.

Colquhoun was called up into the Royal Medical Corps as an ambulance driver during the Second World War but was discharged following an injury in 1941. Following his release from duty, he and MacBryde immediately moved to London where they stayed with Peter Watson, who introduced them to Lucian Freud, John Minton, Keith Vaughan and John Craxton. When 'The Two Roberts' eventually left Watson's house, they moved to Notting Hill with John Minton. The reputations of both artists were consolidated by their being taken on by the Lefevre Gallery shortly after moving to London, where Colquhoun had his first one man exhibiton in 1943.

Two Actors was painted five years after Colquhoun's arrival in London and three years after his first solo show, when his reputation was at its height. Although the painting is clearly figurative, Colquhoun confidently objectifies and abstracts his actors and presents them against a backdrop of flat, divided colour with no reference to a setting or stage. Their faces, broken up into facets of colour, look blankly away from one another and away from the viewer. Their eyes appear hollow, the only reference to their status as actors appearing in their theatrical costume. Of course, the true sense of their acting is in their roles as actors for Colquhoun's picture, where they suppress their identities to be abstracted into his scene. In the only interview given by Colquhoun, the artist summarised his pre-occupation with form and colour when he stated that, 'Each painting is a kind of discovery, a discovery of new forms, colour relation, or balance in composition' (Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, Constable, London, 1988, p.243).