Though undoubtedly a gifted artist, Robertson had a somewhat uneven career: his unconventional lifestyle and avant-garde nude paintings scandalised Edinburgh society and he enjoyed little success after leaving Scotland for Liverpool in the mid 1920s. This powerful image of two mounted warriors locked in combat owes much to the Vorticist movement of the early twentieth century which led to so many outstanding images of the First World War. Here the style is used to capture the action of a famous episode in Scottish history six centuries earlier, in 1314, when the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun attacked Robert the Bruce on the eve of the Battle of Bannockburn. De Bohun aimed to gain honour by killing the Scottish leader and forestalling the battle scheduled for the morrow but his ambition came to nothing: Bruce mounted on a pony and carrying only a battleaxe swerved away from his assailant, stood up in his saddle and killed him with a blow from his axe. Over the following two days the Scottish army won a decisive and important victory over the English. Robertson makes a host of diagonals spring from the very centre of his painting, as the light catches banners and flags, armour and thrashing hooves, creating the type of energetic three-dimensional swirling motion, or vortex, that led Ezra Pound to coin the term ‘Vorticism’ in 1914.

Eric Harald MacBeth Robertson, 1887-1941

Born in Dumfries, Robertson studied architecture before switching to art, training at the Royal Institution and Edinburgh College of Art. His early figure work is Symbolist in spirit, influenced by Rosetti and Burne-Jones and by John Duncan. After the First World War his style veered towards that of Wyndham Lewi and the Vorticists. He was a founder member of the Edinburgh Group; indeed, part of the attraction of the group's exhibitions for the Edinburgh middle class was the expectation of being righteously shocked by Robertson's work.