From Soho’s Sweethearts to Shadows, Rediscovering the Two Roberts

31 August 2025

MacBryde and Colquhoun in London, 1951. Photograph: Baron/Getty Images

On an August night in 1944, London waited nervously as bombs whispered overhead. In the darkness of a Notting Hill studio, Robert Colquhoun lit a candle, his hand trembling with both fear and determination. He and his partner Bobby MacBryde made art that pulsed with queer desire and postwar urgency. They were inseparable, incandescent, becoming icons of London’s bohemian scene ruled Soho’s back alleys, filled Bond Street galleries, and captivated all with their avant-garde genius. Their intertwined fame, ambition, and charm made them “The Two Roberts,” brightest stars until they vanished into obscurity.

Their story began at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-1930s. Fresh from humble beginnings, Bobby saved wages from a boot factory, and Robert returned to school on scholarship after being pulled out by his father. Both thrived at art school, winning every prize and earning the institution’s first joint travelling scholarship. Their European travels brought them face to face with wartime upheaval and with art history’s giants, including Picasso’s Guernica. Their bond, shaped by shared longing and artistic hunger, sparked both sensational paintings of longing domestic scenes and daring still lifes of fish and fruit that seemed to dance alive.

By the 1940s they were the toast of the art world. Their parties in a Notting Hill flat drew Elizabeth Smart, dancers from the Royal Ballet, and poets like Dylan Thomas. Champagne flowed amid rationing. They appeared in Vogue and on film. They were hip, hungry, and magnetic. Trusting and generous, they fed everyone they invited, hosting long nights, intense debates, and bohemian enchantments. They knew everyone and surprised no one when their fire faded.

Their decline was as swift as their ascent. Postwar reality dimmed their light. Styles shifted, finances sank, homophobia lingered. The pressures of love and survival took their toll. Robert died age 47; Bobby followed at 52. Their legacy wilted in the absence of champions. Galleries forgot them. Queer history eclipsed them. They became footnotes, if even that.

Now, writer Damian Barr revives their story through a novel and an upcoming exhibition. His novel fictionalizes their lives turning archival sketches into living breaths, giving body to their LGBTQ-infused domesticity and creative brilliance. The exhibition, at Charleston in Lewes later this year, aims to reclaim their place in art history and queer memory. Sometimes fiction bridges the gaps left dark by oppression and erasure; sometimes it is a moral imperative.

There’s something heartbreaking in the idea of two prodigies made invisible. Their Glasgow origins Protestant and Catholic, working class, children out of school contrasted with the elitist art circles they inhabited. Their art was radical, both personal and universal. Their friendship felt like communion. In times when queer life was criminalized, their love fed their art and threatened them. One close friend, arrested for “gross indecency,” was jailed for months; they fetched him upon release. When people tried to label them as roommates or friends, Barr writes it as a polite lie more suffocating than a gravestone. Theirs was a love that was forbidden and fearless.

Barr’s rediscovery feels urgent, even pilgrimage-like. He speaks of standing outside their old studio and breathing in the light through that north-facing window. The pencil shavings, the smell of oil paints, the ghost of that audacious life they remain. If we fail to remember artists unlike ourselves, whose identities reflect ours in quiet ways, we hazard losing truth itself.

Their work still lifes that glowed of hidden desire, mourning figures locked in private grief carries queer domesticity into high art. Frances Spalding wrote their portraits could be seen as a single organism made of two intertwined personalities. On the wall of Soho art fame they shimmered briefly as twin suns then were eclipsed. Now, Barr is restoring their light.

When he first encountered their work online during lockdown, he felt the pull. Two Women Sewing: the blue stopped him. He needed to know who it was. When he learned about Grieving Women, he demanded they join the pantheon of Scottish modern masters. Grief, love, isolation they poured into those canvases.

Their lives testify to how art, and love, continue when the world burns around you. They thrived amid tyranny and promise; they died amid rejection and disuse. Yet even in hauntings, their art speaks. We read their story not to mourn, but to reawaken. They had everything, genius, love, fervor and then nothing. Now, finally, we reclaim what was lost.