In 1940 Colquhoun was called up to serve in the Second World War and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps but he was discharged in February 1941 after a mental and physical collapse. His paintings often seem to mirror his own troubled life as well as reflecting his knowledge of modern art trends such as the Cubism of Braque and Picasso and its subsequent variations and offshoots. In 1945 he was deeply impressed by a major Picasso exhibition.

Robert Colquhoun, 1914-1962

Robert Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire. In 1933 he obtained a scholarship to Glasgow School of Art where a fellow student was Robert MacBryde, who became his lifelong friend and companion. Colquhoun studied under Hugh Adam Crawford and Ian Fleming, and his early work was much influenced by the paintings of Braque, Picasso and Wyndham Lewis. Scholarships enabled Colquhoun and MacBryde to travel to France and Italy between 1937 and 1939. Colquhoun served as an ambulance driver for a year before being invalided out of the army in 1941, when he went to London with MacBryde. They moved into a studio in Bedford Gardens that they shared with John Minton. Through Peter Watson, the publisher of Horizon, they met and became friends with other artists of the Neo-Romantic Group. Colquhoun experimented with landscape in the manner of his new friends but soon turned back to the angularities of Wyndham Lewis. Jankel Adler, the émigré Polish artist and friend of Klee, moved into Bedford Gardens in 1943, and he encouraged Colquhoun to forget landscape and concentrate on the figure alone, set within a shallow picture space.
Colquhoun and MacBryde exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in their 6 Scottish Artists show in 1942, and the following year Colquhoun had his first one-man show, the first of many, there. He was at the peak of his success, painting many outstanding figurative works. The figures in these paintings have an underlying feeling of desolation and detachment that runs throughout his work.
By 1947, however, Colquhoun's fortunes had begun to decline. He and MacBryde were evicted from their London studio and moved to Lewes, Sussex. There they occupied a studio belonging to Frances Byng Stamper and Catherine Lucas, the owners of Miller's Press, for which both artists made lithographs and drawings. In 1949 they moved to Dunmow, Essex, where they stayed for five years. Colquhoun began to concentrate on animal painting, but there was little work ad very little money. Their limited income came mainly from commissions for stage designs. Colquhoun and MacBryde provided designs for costumes and sets for Léonide Massine's Scottish ballet Donald of the Burtheni (produced at Covent Garden in 1951), and in 1953 Colquhoun made designs for a production of King Lear at Stratford. A further commission came from the Arts Council for a large canvas for its 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition Sixty Paintings for 51.
In 1958 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London organised a retrospective exhibition of Colquhoun's work for which he produced eleven new paintings. The show was fairly well received, providing enough money to allow him and MacBryde to visit Spain. After their return to London Colquhoun's health declined, and he died of heart disease in 1962.