Painting the town together

This book recounts a terrible story of self-destruction by two painters who, in their heyday, achieved considerable renown in Britain and abroad. Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66), both from Scottish working-class families, met in 1932 when they were students at the Glasgow School of Art. From then onwards they were personally and professionally inseparable in their headlong rise to fame and descent downhill. Although both have been the subject of anecdotes and snapshots in many a memoir of the period — all those accounts of Soho and ‘Fitzrovia’ — this is the first full-length study devoted to them, the result of over 20 years’ research.

Their early life is reasonably well documented and is even more so during their student years when both received a rigorous training in Glasgow, becoming outstanding draughtsmen. Their talent was quickly recognised and they received grants to travel in Europe.

The author gives a good account of this Grand Tour — the one-night cheap hotels and forbidding train journeys forming a background to their intoxicating aesthetic discoveries.