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Modern British and Irish Art

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Lot 18^AR

Robert Colquhoun
(British, 1914-1962)
Tomato Plants 45.7 x 51.4 cm. (18 x 20 1/4 in.)

12 June 2019, 15:00 BST

London, New Bond Street

Sold for £33,812.50 inc. premium

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Robert Colquhoun (British, 1914-1962)

Tomato Plants
signed 'R Colquhoun' (lower right)
oil on canvas
45.7 x 51.4 cm. (18 x 20 1/4 in.)
Painted in 1942

Footnotes

Provenance
Lady Herbert
With Leicester Galleries, London, 1961, where acquired by
Professor Symons
His sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 June 1993, lot 59, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Robert Colquhoun, March-May 1958, cat.no.9
London, The Arts Council of Great Britain, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, Robert Colquhoun: Paintings and Drawings, 27 June-12 July 1958, cat.no.3; this exhibition travelled to Leicester, City Art Gallery, 19 July-9 August and Leeds, University of Leeds, 11 October-1 November
London, Leicester Galleries, Artist's of Fame and Promise, Part II, 30 August-22 September 1962, cat.no.121
Edinburgh, The Scottish Arts Council, Modern Art from Scottish Houses, 13 July-9 August 1969, cat.no.22
London, Mayor Gallery, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, 11 February-25 March 1977, cat.no.3

The present work is one of two oils with the same title, both dating to 1942, the second example residing in the Government Art Collection. Both are executed in a similarly earthy palette, Sutherland-esque in construction, with tangled vines sheltering green inedible fruit beneath a stormy sky. The foliage beyond the vine is spikey and bare and the distant ground arid, lacking the lushness one would associate with late spring time of tomato season. Tomato Plants is a prime example of Colquhoun's important but brief engagement with neo-romanticism. Now into the third year of relentless war and with fresh produce hard to come by, tomatoes had become a mainstay of countless "victory gardens". Colquhoun's depiction can be poetically read as hopeful if not prophetic and whilst peacetime will have seemed like a distant concept, he allows a single daub of peach pigment on the central fruit, suggesting that even among such conditions the vine is on the verge of ripening.

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