THE TWO ROBERTS

By Damian Barr

Canongate Books. 310 pages. £18.99. ISBN 978-1-80530-154-7

Reviewed by Jim Burns

A few words by way of an explanation. This is a novel, but because it is a novel with an identifiable factual basis it might be useful to say a little about the characters and facts behind the story that Damian Barr tells us. Some people may object to this on the grounds that a novel should be read purely as a work of fiction and without recourse to any historical background. I’ve never thought that was true and have always accepted that a novelist can use real people and real events while being at liberty to add new fictional characters and imagine new situations. The test is to make the reader believe that whatever is described could have happened. I must admit, too, that in my own case I would find it impossible not to be aware of the actual personalities who inspired the novelist. The two Roberts have had a place in my mind for many years.

Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were Scottish artists, born in 1914 and 1913 respectively. They were both from working-class families, with Colquhoun’s slightly better-off. He was from a Protestant background, MacBryde was Catholic. Neither had what might be called ideal childhoods and both had struggled to get any kind of encouragement for their early signs of artistic skills, apart from one or two sympathetic individuals. MacBryde had worked as a delivery boy and in a factory after leaving school when he was fourteen. Colquhoun was taken to the factory where his father worked, and looked set to be employed there, until the art teacher at the school he’d been attending intervened and persuaded his parents that he needed to spend more time developing his talents as an artist. Barr’s version of their early years builds up impressions of them, with MacBryde seemingly the livelier of the two, while Colquhoun comes across as more withdrawn.

The novel really takes off when they meet at Glasgow Art School in 1931. It’s from this point that we begin to follow the narrative of what is, essentially, a love story with a background of the art world of the ten or so years before the Second World War, the duration of the war, and the fifteen or so years after it. Barr keeps the account moving quickly, with sufficient relevant details to establish each period. We are introduced to the penny-pinching lives of art students in the Thirties, or at least some of them. Both MacBryde and Colquhoun always had a strong awareness of where they were from, in terms of class and nationality, and it came out in their attitudes towards those with money and, in particular, wealthy, patronising English people. Interestingly, neither of the two Roberts appears to have been political. It’s difficult to imagine them joining the Communist Party, as many artists did during the Depression. There is no waving of the Red Flag in their paintings. But they had travelled in Italy, France, and other European countries, and must have been aware of the rising tensions on the Continent. However, in Barr’s novel their main preoccupation, beyond visiting various art galleries, churches, and the like, was adding to their collection of the buttons they took from each homosexual encounter they experienced.

One of the invented characters in the novel is a man called Morris who takes them into the homosexual “underground” of Glasgow, with its meeting places in a local baths and a pub where drag artists perform. How much of this is fact and how much fiction is difficult to say.

When war was declared in 1939 both Roberts had to register for call-up. MacBryde was rejected for military service because of his history of tuberculosis, but Colquhoun was posted to a Royal Army Medical Corp (RAMC) depot to be trained as an ambulance driver. He wasn’t suited to army life, and his absence caused MacBryde a great deal of grief. A campaign was started to obtain Colquhoun’s release from military service, influential acquaintances contacted, strings were pulled, and the two Roberts were re-united.

They moved to London in 1941 and it’s from this point that they began to attract attention from art critics and others who could help to publicise their   work. The breakthrough happened in May 1942 when the critic John Tonge wrote an article on “Scottish Painting” for Horizon, a key intellectual publication of the 1940s. Both Roberts were discussed and a single painting by each of them accompanied the text. As Barr tells it, they rushed out when the magazine was published to find a shop stocking it, and saw the article listed on the cover with other contributions about Flaubert and Hart Crane. Years ago, in the 1960S, as I moved around the country visiting second-hand bookshops, I picked up a copy of this issue of Horizon, and it was, probably, my introduction to the two Roberts.

Colquhoun and MacBryde became well-known members of the London bohemia of the 1940s and 1950s, drinking and partying with artists and writers like Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, John Craxton, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart, John Minton, and others, who frequented the pubs and clubs of Soho and Fitzrovia. One of the intriguing real-life characters Barr introduces into his story is the Polish-Jewish artist, Jankel Adler, a more sober (in every sense of the word) person than either of the two Roberts and, according to Roger Bristow’s The Last Bohemians, a key influence on Colquhoun’s painting. Barr has him addressing Adler as “master” as a sign of respect for his skills as an artist.

The 1940s and early-1950s were productive years for the two Roberts, despite an increasing reputation for heavy drinking and falling out in public. They both turned out paintings of quality, though MacBryde’s range of subjects tended to be limited mostly to still life studies. Colquhoun designed the costumes and sets for a production of King Lear at Stratford, and with MacBryde, the costumes and sets for a Scottish ballet, Donald of the Burthens, to be performed by the Sadlers Wells Ballet Company at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Barr describes them “tumbling” into the foyer for the premiere of the ballet : “Jacketed staff turn to the commotion, having already started to reclaim the place the moment the final audience member made their way through and now here are these two…..what? Tramps?”.

It didn’t get any better and, almost always in need of funds and frequently being asked to move on because of their incessant arguing, they were often reduced to “borrowing” money and asking friends to provide them with accommodation. It was always risky to give them a bed for the night. Barr’s version of the time the Irish writer Anthony Cronin invited them back to his flat is lighter than Cronin’s. Colquhoun had chased MacBryde into the garden and was brandishing a knife. Both were naked. Barr says that one constable arrived in response to complaints from neighbours, but Cronin, in his memoir, Dead as Doornails, says that it was a sergeant and two constables who turned up.

Drink, and their general behaviour, obviously had an effect on how the two Roberts were viewed, but they were also victims of changing fashions in art. The neo-romanticism of the 1940s in both painting and poetry was less-regarded than it had been. Abstract Expressionism was beginning to filter through from the United States, and New York was taking over from Paris as the centre of the art world. The hard-drinking bohemianism of the 1940s was less obvious. It’s significant to note that Barr’s chapters mostly become shorter as the 1950s progress and are often focused on MacBryde’s letters to friends and acquaintances, And they invariably include a request for a small loan.

It all came to an end in 1962 when Colquhoun died of a heart attack while working on a canvas in his studio. The years of drinking, irregular eating, and rough living had taken their toll. Barr’s account is full of pathos as MacBryde cradles Colquhoun in his arms. MacBryde later drifted to Dublin and was killed in 1966 when he left a pub and stepped into the path of a car which ran him down and then failed to stop.

It has been difficult for me to write about The Two Roberts without referring to the actual events that Barr pays attention to. I accepted the fact that, as a novelist, he was free to bend a few details to suit the story. But I couldn’t help thinking, when he has Colquhoun and MacBryde frequenting the Colony Room during the war, that it only opened in 1948. And it did seem a bit odd to refer to MacBryde walking from Waverley Station to the Café Royal to meet Cyril Connelly and Peter Watson. The latter pair certainly frequented the Café Royal, but in London. It may be that I’m nit-picking and I’ve read too many books about bohemian London in the 1940s? I must admit that neither of the details mentioned held up the narrative flow, nor did they spoil my enjoyment of Barr’s book. He doesn’t claim to have written a social or art history account. It’s a love story that he offers us and it can be movingly effective at times, as well as being written in a lively style that pushes the action from page to page.

It might give an indication of how the reputations of Colquhoun and MacBryde stood some years after their deaths if I mention that the exhibition, A Paradise Lost : The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-1955, at The Barbican in 1987, had paintings by Colquhoun alongside work by John Piper, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, John Minton, and others, but nothing by MacBryde. I wonder if it would be any different today?  

It occurs to me that some readers, having read the novel, might want to look in more detail at the lives and work of the two Roberts. Roger Bristow’s The Last Bohemians (Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2010) is a large, informative biography of the pair. Patrick Elliott’s The Two Roberts : Robert Colquhoun & Robert MacBryde (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2014) is the catalogue for the fine 2014 exhibition of their work and full of excellent illustrations. A smaller, but useful catalogue was published by the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, for their exhibition, The Roberts, In March 2010.   Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails was published by the Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1976. It's well worth looking at Richard Cork’s Jankel Adler : The British Years (Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, 2014) to see how Adler influenced Robert Colquhoun’s work.

The exhibition, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun : Lovers, Artists, Outsiders, curated by Damian Barr, is at Charleston in Lewes, 15^th October 2025 to 12^th April 2026.