Robert MacBryde was born 5 December 1913 at Maybole in South Ayrshire. He worked in an engineering works for five years after leaving school and studied art at Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1937. There, he met Robert Colquhoun with whom he established a lifelong friendship and collaboration, the pair becoming known to all and sundry as ‘The Two Roberts’. In 1937, they were both awarded first prize for drawing and that was followed by a post-diploma award to study for a further year. Assisted by travelling scholarships, MacBryde studied and travelled in France and Italy, returning to Great Britain in 1939. MacBryde was exempted from military service because of weak lungs in the Second World War, but Colquhoun was called up in 1940 and despite his record of ill-health, served as an ambulance driver in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After collapsing from a heart condition, he was discharged and the pair moved to London in 1941. The pair’s wild behaviour (excessive even by Fitzrovian standards) made them notorious figures of London’s wartime bohemia. There, they entered the Neo-Romantic circle, sharing the same friends and influences. The ‘Two Roberts’ shared similar subjects, and although MacBryde was considered the lesser artist, his strong sense of colour and pattern was shown at its best in his still life paintings of the late 1940s. Known also as ‘The ‘Wild Boys’, the Two Roberts took a studio at 77 Bedford Gardens, which they shared at first with Minton. Their social circle included Michael Ayrton, Minton, Prunella Clough and Keith Vaughan. In 1943 Jankel Adler moved into the same building, bringing with him a variety of European influences which were of vital importance in the development of Colquhoun and MacBryde’s art. He had worked with Paul Klee in the 1930s and it was Klee’s practice of drawing in carbon transfer that Adler introduced to Colquhoun and MacBryde. MacBryde held his first one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1943 and it was well-received. Influenced by Graham Sutherland and John Piper, MacBryde became a well-known painter of the Modernist school of art, known for his brightly coloured Cubist studies. His later work evolved into a darker, brooding Expressionist range of still lifes and landscapes. Emmanuel Cooper would write in his book The Sexual Perspective: ‘Despite the great similarities of their background and experiences, the two Roberts were different in character and personality. Colquhoun was shy, reserved and introspective, seeming to lack energy, yet he had an ability to concentrate which enabled him to paint in the noisiest and most disturbed of conditions. MacBryde was louder, expressing himself freely and with ease as well as entertaining drinking companions with his rich singing voice. He jealously guarded Colquhoun and made scenes when their relationship seemed threatened by Colquhoun’s relationships with women.’ In collaboration with Colquhoun, MacBryde created several set designs both during and after the Second World War. These included sets for Gielgud’s Macbeth, King Lear at Stratford and Massine’s ballet Donald of the Burthens, produced by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1951. MacBryde’s loyal support of Colquhoun was essential to the latter’s success. Following eviction from their studio in 1947, they moved to Lewes in East Sussex and were given a studio by Frances Byng Stamper and her sister Caroline Lucas, who were running the Miller’s Press. The sisters commissioned a number of lithographs. The results were shown in the first exhibition of the Society of London Painter-Printers mounted at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1948. Notwithstanding, MacBryde was constantly in debt, his work declined in the late 1950s and he produced little after Colquhoun’s death from alcoholism and heart disease in 1962. MacBryde died on 6 May 1966, in consequence of a traffic accident in Dublin. The 1938 pen and ink portrait Robert MacBryde by Robert Colquhoun may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 1997 Scots playwright John Byrne premiered his play Colquhoun and MacBryde at the Royal Court in London. Portraying both artists as gay, it explored their journey from youthful obscurity in a pre-war Glasgow garret to their season as the toast of London’s cultural cognoscenti during the 1940s, wowing the critics and partying with the likes of Dylan Thomas and George Barker, before their inexorable, drink-fuelled slide from favour.