Robert Colquhoun

Roger Senhouse Esq., London, circa 1945
Private Collection, U.K.

Paris, Quelques Contemporains Anglais: Exposition de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1945-March 1946, no.5, and toured by the British Council to Marseilles, Prague and Bratislava;
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Robert Colquhoun, March - May 1958, no.29.

The canvas is unlined. It undulates slightly in the corners and has worn quite thin in a small spot in the upper left corner. There are four small areas of light craquelure: two in the lower left quadrant, one in the lower right quadrant and one in the lower left quadrant. There is a fleck of paint loss where the surface has suffered from a light abrasion in the upper right quadrant. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held in a gilded rectilinear frame with a canvas slip.
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The present work, painted circa 1945, is stylistically very close to the previous lot. The face of the card-player is abstracted and closed to the viewer. The dark, windowless room refuses any sense of recognition or comprehension to the viewer. And yet the subject of the work is clearly readable. The objects in the room: cards, chair and table, present a recognisable activity in a comprehensible interior. The Card Player presents Colquhoun in the process of developing his interests in form, colour harmony and subtle abstraction in relation to the human form.

A few years after the execution of the present work, Wyndham Lewis valued Colquhoun as the best of the younger generation when he described how it was 'very unusual to find la condition humaine attacked, as a subject, by artists in any field in England today'. (Malcolm Yorke, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, Constable, London, 1988, p.243).