Robert Colquhoun (British, 1914-1962)
Peasant Woman
incised 'Colquhoun/45' (upper right)
oil on canvas
45 x 36.3 cm. (17 11/16 x 14 5/16 in.)
Footnotes:
Provenance
With The Leferve Gallery, London

Peasant Woman was painted during the time which is widely regarded by critics as the artist's most successful. By 1945 Colquhoun was well established in London, following his move in 1941 from Glasgow with fellow Scottish artist and partner Robert MacBryde. Based in Kensington, through the patronage and care of Peter Watson, he became integral to the Neo-Romantics, including John Minton, John Craxton and Keith Vaughan. By 1942 the influential Polish émigré artist, Jankel Adler (1895-1949), had taken a studio in the same building and was instrumental in exposing the group to the pictorial vocabulary of Braque's style of Cubism, which gradually replaced the Romantic tone of Colquhoun's work, as can be seen in Peasant Woman. Malcolm Yorke remarks on this relationship:

'Adler was responsible for weaning Colquhoun and MacBryde away from the English landscape tradition (it had never been their tradition, anyway) and on to a richer eclecticism, a less parochial style, and more humanistic subject matter. As he explored his Jewish tradition, so he urged them to explore their Celtic heritage. Soon Colquhoun began to paint Irish and Scottish peasant women, haggard, shawled and black-skirted. These remote static figures were meant, like Adler's, to represent something archetypal, enduring through time, but they are also expressed in an unmistakably twentieth-century idiom derived from Picasso and Braque.' (Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times, Constable, London, 1988, pp.241-242).
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Overall framed dimensions 60.5 x 52 x 6cm.

The canvas has not been lined and provides a stable support.
There is surface dirt across the work.
There is some light rubbing to the framed edges.
Upon closer inspection, to the top of the left framed edge there is a small indent in the paint surface with some associated fine cracking.
Again upon close inspection, there is a vertical line of fine stable craquelure measuring approximately 6cm to the centre of the lower-right quadrant.
Inspection under UV light reveals no clear evidence of restoration or retouching.