Footnotes

Provenance
With The Lefevre Gallery, London.
Sale, Christie's, London, 19 March 1971, lot 87.
Sale, Bonhams, Edinburgh, 4 December 2014, lot 49.
Private Collection, UK (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibited
London, The Lefevre Gallery, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and Winifred Nicholson, May 1949, cat. no. 15.
London, The Kaplan Gallery, Recent Paintings by Robert MacBryde, Recent Drawings by Robert Colquhoun, April 1960, cat. no. 12.

Literature
R. Bristow, The Last Bohemians, Sansom and Co., Bristol, 2010, p. 365 and 385.

Ayrshire-born artists Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun earned the title "the Darlings of Bond Street" during their time in London, gaining significant recognition with a series of successful exhibitions at the Lefevre and Redfern Galleries in the 1940s.

Their shared studio at Bedford Gardens in Kensington became a well-known meeting place for prominent figures like John Minton (who lived with them), Bacon, Freud, Ayrton, Clough, Finlay, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Dylan Thomas. Close neighbours, including Jankel Adler — an old friend from Glasgow — and Wyndham Lewis, offered valuable encouragement and support during this period.

In 1949, the year this painting was created, the artists were evicted from their studio. By then, MacBryde's talent and reputation were at their peak. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York had already pre-purchased works by MacBryde, Colquhoun, Burra, Bacon, and Freud from the Lefevre Gallery's 1948 Modern British Painting exhibition. Patrick Heron's review of the show, which featured artists including Hepworth, Nicholson, and Lewis, praised MacBryde, noting that he was "building stealthily and calmly" (Roger Bristow, The Last Bohemians: The Two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, Bristol, 2010, p. 221).

Throughout the 1940s, both Colquhoun and MacBryde were further inspired to explore figurative subjects, partly due to their friendship with Adler and the influence of a major Picasso retrospective at the V&A in 1945. While Colquhoun continued to focus on figurative themes, MacBryde eventually shifted toward still life subjects, for which he became widely recognised.