Robert Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock on 20 December 1914. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy and won a scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art, where he met Robert MacBryde. They formed an intimate and lifelong friendship of such mutual devotion it caused them to be known as ‘The Two Roberts’. Colquhoun joined MacBryde on a travelling scholarship to France and Italy from 1937 to 1939. Colquhoun was called up in 1940 to serve as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was discharged after collapsing from a heart complaint. The Two Roberts moved to London in 1941, where Colquhoun had his first solo exhibition the following year and MacBryde his only solo exhibition in 1943. Befriended by Peter Watson, who was then publishing the literary magazine Horizon, the Two Roberts were introduced into the social circle of John Minton, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton, Prunella Clough and the original hell-raiser himself, Dylan Thomas. During the day, Colquhoun drove an ambulance for Civil Defence and painted at night in the studio at 77 Bedford Gardens they shared with Minton. The Polish refugee Jankel Adler, arrived in 1943 and had much to teach them. Colquhoun’s early work was influenced by the colours and light of the Ayrshire countryside and included pictures of agricultural labourers and workmen portrayed with a genuine sense of feeling. This developed into a brooding, expressionistic style, strongly influenced by Picasso. Austere, yet precise, he portrayed tortured and agonised figures in oil, using characteristic browns and reds. His interest in human and animal forms is exemplified by Woman with Birdcage (Bradford Art Gallery), Woman in Green (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Two Scotswomen (Museum of Modern Art, New York). These existential images were favourably received and compared with those of contemporaries such as Francis Bacon. Colquhoun’s influences included Pablo Picasso, Jankel Adler and Percy Wyndham Lewis. Possibly out of fear of prosecution neither Colquhoun nor MacBryde painted explicitly homosexual themes and it has been alleged by experts that study of their works reveals the psychological intensity of their relationship. Women, either alone or in pairs, were frequent motifs for Colquhoun in the mid 1940s. Through these figures, he conveyed the themes of poverty, old age, isolation and a ‘resignation to the human condition’. With MacBryde, he designed several theatre sets, including John Gielgud’s Macbeth, George Devine’s King Lear at Stratford and for the Scottish Ballet Donald of the Burthens produced at Covent Garden for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (1951). The Two Roberts put a substantial amount of effort into drinking Fitzrovia dry during the war and spent much time in the company of Nina Hamnett, who by that stage had concluded that sex, drink and gossip was an awful lot more interesting than painting. She was a walking compendium of 20th century art history, having known or bedded, pretty much everyone worth knowing. In the post-war years, the Two Roberts were regulars at the Colony Club in Soho, where their particular brand of boisterous behaviour took place under the benevolent gaze of Muriel Belcher. In the late 1940s Colquhoun was considered one of the leading artists of his generation; he was also a prolific printmaker and produced a large number of lithographs and monotypes throughout his career. He made great use of ‘transfer’ lithography and an ‘off-set’ drawing process for monotypes. For both techniques, a specially prepared carbon paper is used to transfer a drawn image onto a lithographic stone or plate for printing, or onto another piece of paper for monotype. He also made use of the more traditional monotype process of printing from inked surface, usually a glass or metal plate. The two Roberts were evicted from their studio in London and moved to Lewes and worked under the patronage of Frances Byng Stamper and her sister, Caroline Lucas. The prints they produced were shown in the first exhibition of the Society of London Painter-Printers mounted at the Redfern Gallery in 1948. Colquhoun’s alcoholic spiral was delayed by the critical acclaim surrounding the retrospective of his work the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1958. He died of heart disease in the arms of MacBryde in London on 20 September 1962. A good selection of his work may be found in the collection of the Tate in London.