Robert Colquhoun (British, 1914-1962)
Two figures
signed 'Colquhoun' (upper right)
oil on canvas
61 x 51cm (24 x 20 1/16in).
painted circa 1948
Footnotes:
Provenance
Private collection, UK.

Having moved to London in 1941 with his partner Robert MacBryde, the young, talented Robert Colquhoun found himself accepted into the avant-garde milieu of modern artists working in the city. It was here that he met fellow painters including Ben Nicholson, Augustus John, Graham Sutherland, Lucien Freud and John Craxton. Perhaps most influential to him though was the Polish painter Jankel Adler, who took a studio above the Colquhoun and MacBryde from 1943-44. Adler's influence encouraged Colquhoun to develop the fragmentation and increased abstraction which becomes central to his work from this point.

Figurative subject matter provided a seemingly unlimited source and was always of focal interest to Colquhoun throughout his career, as he explained:

'...I am interested in the human figure almost as a thing in itself. It has a value which is always changing and ending... and you can ring the changes on it forever'
Robert Colquhoun, Scottish Painters, Monitor Series, directed by Ken Russell, 1959.

The present work seems to show two actors in costume - the female figure on the right grieving whilst the male figure stands stoically to the left. There is something of the medieval in their costumes and the way in which the woman's hair has been set. The themes of stage become increasingly important to the artist following commissions in the early 1950s to design sets and costumes for theatre and ballet.

The figure of a grieving woman is one that Colquhoun returns to several times, with the current work relating closely to Weeping Woman in the collection of the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. This model of the grieving woman is in turn the inspiration for Colquhoun's 1958 oil Mater Dolorosa housed at the Manchester City Galleries.

We are grateful to Davy Brown for his assistance with the dating of this work.
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