Painting the town together

This book recounts a terrible story of self-destruction by two painters who, in their heyday, achieved considerable renown in Britain and abroad. Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66), both from Scottish working-class families, met in 1932 when they were students at the Glasgow School of Art. From then onwards they were personally and professionally inseparable in their headlong rise to fame and descent downhill. Although both have been the subject of anecdotes and snapshots in many a memoir of the period — all those accounts of Soho and ‘Fitzrovia’ — this is the first full-length study devoted to them, the result of over 20 years’ research.

Their early life is reasonably well documented and is even more so during their student years when both received a rigorous training in Glasgow, becoming outstanding draughtsmen. Their talent was quickly recognised and they received grants to travel in Europe.

The author gives a good account of this Grand Tour — the one-night cheap hotels and forbidding train journeys forming a background to their intoxicating aesthetic discoveries. In the war, Colquhoun suffered the usual indignities meted out to pacifists; MacBryde was exempted from service on health grounds.

They were eventually reunited in London and quickly met the right people — Peter Watson, the Maecenas of Horizon, the supportive Duncan Macdonald of the Lefevre gallery and, later, Wyndham Lewis, who commended them in his reviews (particularly when their work showed his influence) — as well as the roistering crowd of writers, painters and hangers-on invoked in Julian Maclaren-Ross’s famous Memoirs of the Forties. They knew George and Elizabeth Barker, Ruthven Todd, Lucian Freud, Dylan Thomas, John Craxton and the changing flotsam of Soho and Charlotte Street (but surely they must have encountered Nina Hamnett, Queen of wartime Bohemia, whose barstool at the French Pub eventually became her personal commode).