This small watercolour is a compositional study for the major triptych of the same name, now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. The triptych contains a figure being consumed in flames on one panel, alongside the rich blues of a gothic rose window in another. Despite the small scale, it competes equally in intensity, with jewel like colour combined with energetic black line. The Burning III is a powerful expression of Philipson’s emotional state in the early 1960s, following the premature death of his first wife Brenda Mark in 1960.
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.