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Lot Essay
'The Two Roberts' (Colquhoun and MacBryde) met at the Glasgow School of Art (1932-7) and travelled together to France and Italy (1937-9), before returning to Scotland with the onset of World War II. Although MacBryde, being tubercular, was exempt from service, Colquhoun was called up, serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps until he collapsed in February 1941 while carrying heavy mailbags and was, as a result, invalided out of the army.
He then moved with MacBryde to London, where they intially stayed in the art patron, Peter Watson's flat in Prince's Gate, before they took a small studio behind Kensington High Street. During this time Colquhoun worked as a Civil Defence ambulance driver in the day and painted at night.
Dating from 1941, Figures in an air-raid shelter was painted in the year that the two Roberts moved into a larger studio at 77 Bedford Gardens, Campden Hill, which John Minton also shared with them for a short spell, and the work shows Colquhoun's involvement in the Neo-Romantic movement. The war had the effect of isolating British artists from the more contemporary influences of Europe and instead they assimilated influences from the tradition of English landscape painting stretching back through Piper and Sutherland to Palmer and Constable.
Malcolm Yorke (loc. cit.) comments, 'London as a subject never seemed to have any appeal to Colquhoun in all the years he lived there, but, like Moore, he was intrigued by people settling down for the night in the wartime tube stations and air raid shelters. Keith Vaughan's soldiers in their bunks (see lot 210) also come to mind when ones sees Composition with Figures (Air Raid Shelter) (1941) [the present work]. These figures, whilst nothing like portraits, are more particularised than Moore attempted'.
He then moved with MacBryde to London, where they intially stayed in the art patron, Peter Watson's flat in Prince's Gate, before they took a small studio behind Kensington High Street. During this time Colquhoun worked as a Civil Defence ambulance driver in the day and painted at night.
Dating from 1941, Figures in an air-raid shelter was painted in the year that the two Roberts moved into a larger studio at 77 Bedford Gardens, Campden Hill, which John Minton also shared with them for a short spell, and the work shows Colquhoun's involvement in the Neo-Romantic movement. The war had the effect of isolating British artists from the more contemporary influences of Europe and instead they assimilated influences from the tradition of English landscape painting stretching back through Piper and Sutherland to Palmer and Constable.
Malcolm Yorke (loc. cit.) comments, 'London as a subject never seemed to have any appeal to Colquhoun in all the years he lived there, but, like Moore, he was intrigued by people settling down for the night in the wartime tube stations and air raid shelters. Keith Vaughan's soldiers in their bunks (see lot 210) also come to mind when ones sees Composition with Figures (Air Raid Shelter) (1941) [the present work]. These figures, whilst nothing like portraits, are more particularised than Moore attempted'.