Robert Colquhoun

Acquired from Mr Richard Smart (via Whitechapel Art Gallery, London) by Wilfrid A. Evill May 1958 for £100.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Alex Reid & Lefevre, Robert Colquhoun, October - November 1947, cat. no.16;
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Robert Colquhoun: paintings, drawings and prints from 1942-1958, March -  May 1958, cat. no.57 (as Woman in a Window);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part I- section 3) cat. no.4 ( as Portrait of a Woman);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.20.

The colours are slightly less orange than the printed catalogue illustration indicates. Original canvas. There is a small protrusion to the canvas above the lower edge in the lower right corner, with a resultant tiny fleck of paint loss. There is an additional fleck of paint loss just to the left of this. There is a minor stretcher bar mark along the left edge. There is a very minor area of paint separation to the dark blue pigment between the woman's shoulder and the window pane. The surface has recently been cleaned and is in generally good original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals an opaque varnish but no apparent signs of retouching. Held in a gilt plaster frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Born in Kilmarnock, 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 they were heavily influenced by the French avant garde, 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 after an injury in 1941. Following his release from duty, he and MacBryde immediately moved to London where they stayed with the great collector and patron, 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.

Woman at a Window was painted six years after Colquhoun's arrival in London and four years after his first solo show, when his reputation was at its height. He had become particularly close to the Polish painter Jankel Adler who had worked with Paul Klee and the present work undoubtedly demonstrates his knowledge and understanding of European modernism. The sharply faceted and angular features of the woman's face are reminiscent of Picasso and Braque's cubist experiments whilst the large expanses of intense saturated colour verge scintillatingly on the abstract, providing a highly dramatic backdrop for the figure who emerges from a dynamic grid of colour. 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).