Robert MacBryde

(b Maybole, Ayrshire [now Strathclyde], 5 Dec 1913; d Dublin, 6 May 1966). Scottish painter. He was closely associated with Robert Colquhoun, whom he met as a student at Glasgow School of Art in 1932 and with whom he travelled to France and Italy from 1937 to 1939. Exempt from military service in World War II, he followed Colquhoun to London where they entered the Neo-Romantic circle, sharing the same friends and influences (see NEO-ROMANTICISM). Although his work is sometimes considered derivative of Colquhoun's, some of his still-lifes, for example Table in a Red Room (1950; AC Eng), show him to have been a competent painter. Notorious figures of Fitzrovia, London's wartime bohemia, he and Colquhoun feature in many literary memoirs, regarded as casualties of a 'lost generation'. His loyal support of Colquhoun was essential to the latter's success. He was constantly in debt, his work declined in the late 1950s and he produced little after his friend's death.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Table with Fruit, 1948.

Robert MacBryde (1913 - 1966) was a Scottish still-life and figure painter and a theatre set designer.

MacBryde was born in Maybole and worked in a factory for 5 years after leaving school. He studied art at Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1937. There, he met Robert Colquhoun with whom he established a lifelong friendship and collaboration, the pair becoming known as "the two Roberts". MacBryde studied and travelled in France and Italy, assisted by scholarships, returning to London in 1939. He shared studio space with Colquhoun, and the pair shared a house with John Minton and, from 1943, Jankel Adler. He held his first one-man show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1943.

Influenced by Graham Sutherland and John Piper, MacBryde became a well known painter of the Modernist school of art, known for his brightly coloured Cubist studies. His later work evolved into a darker, Expressionist range of still lifes and landscapes. In collaboration with Colquhoun, he created several set designs during and after the Second World War. These included sets for Gielgud's Macbeth, King Lear at Stratford and Massine's Scottish ballet Donald of the Burthens, produced by the Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden in 1951.

Robert MacBryde died in 1966 in Dublin as a result of a street accident.

External links

• Biography at the Tate Gallery
• Robert MacBryde on the Gazeteer for Scotland

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