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The Last Bohemians

Roger Bristow

“They came in one day and I was mesmerised by them. They were dressed in black from top to toe... I thought - Christ, these are real Bohemians!” Ken Russell

The two largely forgotten giants of Scottish art, known to pre-‘cutting-edge’ art students, particularly in Glasgow, and not that many art lovers and collectors, as The Two Roberts, have influenced countless younger artists through their followers. Joan Eardley, who created her own brand of expressionism, picked up their 'virus' in her earlier work, and successive generations have picked up and disseminated their influence. Many young artists will be employing elements of their vision without even having heard of the two 'R's.

But the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, burnt out too young to capitalise on their youthful success, which went up like a firework and hardly survived longer. Their story is of talent versus human frailty. A timeless kind of saga, but it has never been told yet, so the world has made do with the myths that surrounded these two lovers; some of the myths being their own inventions and others just growing to fill the spaces. One of their own making was the one about their having stolen the Stone of Scone while drunk, eagerly believed by several following generations of art students. And like John Byrne’s play of 1992 produced at the Royal Court Theatre London, which had them sleeping rough out in Cork Street to force a gallery to give them a show. An excellent story, but typically not true - they didn’t have to struggle for that. They doubtlessly camped, but not in a tent.

Roger Bristow has devoted nearly twenty years to hunting down the surviving contemporaries of the Roberts. In many cases he was just in time. Those he spoke to include Prunella Clough, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Ken Russell, George Barker, Jon Craxton and Daniel Farson. Fortunately the kinds of people who inhabit bohemia write letters, and keep them; so correspondence has added dialogue to the tale.

Colquhoun and MacBryde were both born to hard-working families in Ayrshire and grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. Colquhoun had the luck to be supported by his art teacher, who convinced two local patrons of the arts, one in the Church and one in the whisky industry, to provide grants allowing him to remain at school until he applied for a place at Glasgow School of Art, instead of becoming an apprentice as his father wanted. And in that, he was already the embodiment of the Scottish antisyzygy.
MacBride, as he was named until leaving art school, showed an early talent for singing, dancing and entertaining as well as drawing. But despite his artistic skills being encouraged at home and at school, unlike Colquhoun he had to slog through a succession of menial jobs before making it up Scott Street to the then recently-built Charles Rennie Mackintosh building.

Their budding friendship as fellow Ayrshiremen on the daily train-in became mutual devotion when they began sharing a flat near the School. Years later, Colquhoun’s mother, in this precious quote, summed it up ‘defiantly’:
“Bobby met Robert MacBryde on the first day he attended Glasgow Art School. They became such close friends, what could I do about it? And where would Bobby be without MacBryde? Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby.”

It was in the pressurised atmosphere of student life that the two, recognised for their precocious talents as much as for their reputation as loners, became known as ‘The Two Roberts’ - or just ‘The Roberts’ - a composite person. If any of their friends or lecturers suspected that their relationship was intimately physical, they would either have ignored the signs or have been unable to believe them. Scotland, socially and legally weighed down by the presence of the Presbyterian Church well into the 1980s, would have been the last place to openly admit to being homosexual, and the Roberts were so successful in keeping themselves to themselves that one close friend and one-time tutor, Ian Fleming, went to his grave convinced that they were ‘definitely not homosexual... certainly not while they were in Scotland.’
Fleming’s double portrait of the boys, while not being ‘great painting’, speaks volumes about them and about their relationship. I found myself referring back to it while I read the book. Colquhoun is moody, unstable and looking outwards while MacBryde plays The Wife, sitting behind, enigmatically smiling towards his friend and very much in charge. Despite MacBryde’s laid-back appearance in the portrait, he was the one who would tend to break into song or dance at the slightest opportunity, while the dangerous-looking Colquhoun was in fact the more withdrawn and introspective of the two, and both attractive to and attracted by women.

When their art school life came to an end with diplomas in drawing and painting for the two, Colquhoun won the Travelling Scholarship for 1938. This posed a problem for the two, as they would be forced to function for a time as separate halfs - two shells with no oyster. Even the School governors and staff were aware of this. But the Chairman of the Board came to the rescue with a personal donation to MacBryde.

And so the two set off on the Grand Tour, doing Europe: including Paris, Amsterdam, Florence and of course Rome, where they were arrested, in the current amosphere of antipathy, by a policeman who mistook them for Frenchmen . They were forced to return quickly as war broke out across Europe again, and held an exhibition of drawings from the journey, in Kilmarnock. This and other student shows were the only times their work was exhibited for sale in Scotland during their lives.

On their return to Scotland though, they eventually had to contend with the effects of the war. Colquhoun was conscripted; the experience led to serious deterioration in his physical and mental health, and MacBryde, partly out of concern for his partner, decided to drop his conscientious objections to soldiering and sign on. He, too, was found to be unwell, enough to be rejected by the army. A long-established problem with his lungs had left him open to tuberculosis while living in poverty after the European tour.

It was in the midst of this despairing scenario that MacBryde met John Tonge, journalist and art critic, in Waverley Station. A slim chance that reversed the Roberts' fortunes. Tonge was the fast-track connection to London, and this was followed by Colquhoun's discharge from the army.

The two moved south, their painting styles coincidentally maturing into a kind of Euro-modernism; happily in tune with society's reaction against the drab inter-war years. Being homosexual also helped give them entré to patrons and collectors. Their personas as exotic, mad, Scotsmen contributed to the spread of their fame as much as their work did, and they became the Golden Boys of Bond Street. They inevitably had their decriers, being accused of posing as professional Scots (they tended to wear kilts; this may have been an affectation they only took up in London) but on the other hand had to defend their heritage from people like Michael Ayrton, who carelessly included Colquhoun in a radio programme about English art.

In London with its webs of intrigue, the power games, the triumphs and disasters, the account begins to read a little like a thriller. Despite that, there are so many players and so many galleries, publications, new homes and pubs that it could add up to a dry catalogue of facts, and with the added look at painting techniques at best a scholarly exegesis, but Roger Bristow is able to keep it moving along. The Roberts' fame was such that in 1949 The New Statesman could run a clerihew competition about them:

‘There’s a trick we haven’t tried, MacBryde.’
‘We will soon, Colquhoun.’

Before the slow fall from grace, their regular studio soireés attracted Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton,and Dylan Thomas among many.
MacBryde lived on, incredibly, well into the Swinging Sixties, convincingly sporting a Beatle jacket; a man from another world - his lonely vigil ended by a hit and run driver.

This may not be the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, but there are more than enough reproductions to keep the afficionado happy and to wise-up the uninitiated, and while there are no smoky shots of the Coach and Horses or the French House, the photos add flesh to the text. This is, with its exhaustive catalogue raisonné and fastidiously compiled index, The Book.

THE LAST BOHEMIANS Roger Bristow Published by Sansom & Company £29.95
Part of this review was published in the (Glasgow) Herald, 11 April 2010