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In the third quarter of the twentieth century Sir Robin Philipson (1916 – 92) ranked as one of the best known and most prolific artists of what became known as the Edinburgh School. He spent his working life as an art school teacher, heading the Drawing and Painting School at Edinburgh College of Art for over twenty years. He served as Secretary, then as President, of the Royal Scottish Academy.
This new study discusses his double commitment to traditional teaching practice and to the wider encouragement of art across society. Robin Philipson was always fascinated by colour, material and process, and this new study, while exploring a long, active career in painting and printing making, also sheds light on his involvement with a Border textile company and the international Dovecot Studios. Philipson was highly ambitious for his own art. He engaged with the drama of human experience in his painting, and worked on specific themes such as cockflights and war imagery with a keen, raw expressionism. Two particular series, Threnody and Humankind, were key to his painting of the 1970s. Later, his painting achieved a remarkable lyricism in a series of large, bold paintings of poppies which today have almost become his trademark.
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Sir Robin Philipson had a significant, influential presence on the Scottish Art Scene throughout his lifetime. He served as Head of School of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art where he diligently maintained the ideals of the post-war Edinburgh School. And, for a whole decade he was President of the Royal Scottish Academy – a period seen as a Golden Age in Scottish Painting. First and foremost, however, he was a practicing painter.
In 1961 Tom Elder Dickinson described Robin Philipson as ‘…original without being pretentious, forceful without being crass, advanced without being outré. . . At his best he is a supreme painter possessed by a mood of peculiar sensitiveness. I can think of no artist today whose understanding and feeling for the qualities of paint are so perfectly matched to his lyrical purpose; he takes the paint into his very imagination and makes it speak with (an) eloquence and fervour.’
Philipson was enormously important to The Scottish Gallery where we held nine exhibitions in his lifetime. He was doubtless the most high-profile Scottish artist of his generation earning countless honours including a knighthood in 1976.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1954, 1958, 1961 (Festival), 1965 (Festival), 1968, 1970 (Festival), 1973, 1976 (Festival), 1983 (Festival) 1995 (Memorial), 2003, 2006, 2012, 2016 (Centenary)
His art, its free handling, its meaningful decorative values and its sometimes dark subjects, it remains a serious investigation of life. For him the production of art was essential but brave.
Elizabeth Cumming, 2018
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