Footnotes

Provenance
With The Mayor Gallery, London
Frances Byng Stamper
With The Redfern Gallery, London, 6 March 1985, where purchased by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Robert Colquhoun; An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1942 to 1958, March-May 1958, cat.no.32

The present canvas is a smaller version of an almost identical composition, Actors on a Stage, painted the same year. In both works, two figures are depicted side on, embracing in a moment of tenderness, with a cat stretched out on part of a stage above them. Three years after they were painted, in 1948, both Robert Colquhoun and MacBryde were approached by Leonide Massine, a Russian choreographer and ballet dancer, to design the costumes and décor for a Scottish ballet, Donald of the Burthens, which later came to Covent Garden in 1951. The following year they travelled to Italy to see the puppet plays at Modena and the Palio at Sienna. However, as these two works clearly demonstrate, theatrical subject matter had already taken hold before this project, and filtered into Colquhoun's canvases.

Two Actors was painted during the time which is widely regarded by critics as the artist's most successful. By 1945 Colquhoun was well established in London, following his move in 1941 from Glasgow with fellow Scottish artist and partner Robert MacBryde. Based in Kensington, through the patronage and care of Peter Watson, he became integral to the Neo-Romantics, including John Minton, John Craxton and Keith Vaughan. By 1942 the influential Polish émigré artist, Jankel Adler (1895-1949), had taken a studio in the same building and was instrumental in exposing the group to the pictorial vocabulary of Braque's style of Cubism, which gradually replaced the Romantic tone of Colquhoun's work, as can be seen in Two Actors. Malcolm Yorke remarks on this relationship:

'Adler was responsible for weaning Colquhoun and MacBryde away from the English landscape tradition (it had never been their tradition, anyway) and on to a richer eclecticism, a less parochial style, and more humanistic subject matter. As he explored his Jewish tradition, so he urged them to explore their Celtic heritage. Soon Colquhoun began to paint Irish and Scottish peasant women, haggard, shawled and black-skirted. These remote static figures were meant, like Adler's, to represent something archetypal, enduring through time, but they are also expressed in an unmistakably twentieth-century idiom derived from Picasso and Braque (Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place, Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times, Constable, London, 1988, pp.241-242).