ROBERT COLQUHOUN (BRITISH 1914–1962)
LANDSCAPE WITH GOAT
£11,340
Auction: 15 JANUARY 2025 FROM 10:00 GMT
Description
signed, oil on canvas, with a painting of a still life to reverse
Dimensions
42.5cm x 49cm (16 ¾in x 19 ¼in)
Provenance
Sotheby's, London, 5 July 1983, lot 229;
Sandra Lummis Fine Art, London, from whom acquired by Bernard Kelly.
Footnote
In 1941 Robert Colquhoun was invalided from war service and returned to Britain to find a country changed beyond recognition. The world around him had been convulsed by the war, leaving something corrupted. His paintings from this period are thoroughly Neo-romantic in sentiment, subverting the pastoral idyll and rendering the landscape as an unknowable and empty country of haunting beauty. They are at once nostalgic and utterly contemporary.
Colquhoun took a London studio with his lover Robert MacBryde, whom he had met at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1930s. ‘The Two Roberts’, as they came to be known, were folded into the fast-living bohemian circles of Soho. By night they drank, their relationship growing ever more tempestuous, while by day their stars rose apace with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and John Minton.
In Landscape with Goat Colquhoun paints the very land mutating and buckling into shards as though poisoned by humanitarian horrors. A lone goat grazes, a creature that recurs across Colquhoun’s work, likely as much due to the formal interest offered by its craggy, sculptural body as to the dark humour imparted by its satanic connotations. The scene takes place under a brooding night sky - Colquhoun’s rich, dark palette of umbers and ochres is said to have been due to his tendency to paint under artificial light, alone and at night.