Robert Henderson Blyth was only fifteen when he enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art. That year, he had a painting accepted for the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1940, at the age of twenty-one, he met the artist James Cowie at Hospitalfield College of Art in Arbroath. The tutors at Glasgow had encouraged bold use of colour and execution and intuitive painting. Cowie, whose own paintings often have an air of stillness and mystery that borders on the surreal, had a more cerebral, disciplined and linear approach. Blyth found Cowie’s example more sympathetic to his own artistic temperament.

During the Second World War Blyth worked as a medical orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps for four years and was posted to France, Holland and Belgium. Throughout this time he continued to draw and paint. During his service he carried a lamp in his pack which, when fitted with a yellow bulb, gave an approximation of daylight, allowing him to paint during the hours of darkness. Blyth’s sombre paintings of the war years are commentaries on the devastating human consequences of the conflict.

One of his paintings, Dawn without Glory (tribute to the men of the 2nd British Expeditionary Force who embarked for France after Dunkirk), 1942 (Perth & Kinross Council) shows a group of exhausted soldiers resting on a road, some sleeping, some smoking, the road stretching over the horizon before them, a group of officers studying an open map. The influence of Stanley Spencer, who had himself been a medical orderly during the First World War, was a major influence on Blyth and this is evident in the present work. In another painting, Despatch Rider, 1942 (Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, Aberdeen), a single figure stares solemnly into the middle distance as if foreseeing his fate while War Baby, 1918 (Perth & Kinross Council) depicts a young wounded or dead boy soldier. In all of them Blyth creates an air of tension, silence and foreboding – people in suspended animation. His most shocking work on the subject of war, In the Image of Man (Imperial War Museum, London) was painted 1947. It was acquired by the Imperial War Museum and is a surreal depiction of devastation and destruction. Blyth was deeply affected by the tragedy of war – for individuals, for society and for civilization.

His austere self-portrait eloquently conveys these thoughts, through the atmosphere, the sense of cold and silence and the death-like mask of the face whose only animation is in the expression in his haunted eyes that meet ours and command us to think about the ‘precarious existence’ of the soldier in the field of battle. From 1946 to 1954 Blyth taught at Edinburgh College of Art and then Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen where he was Head of Drawing and Painting from 1960 to 1970. He taught and influenced many of the most important Scottish artists of the next generation, including David McClure, John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder.  

This text was first published in Facing the World: Self Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016)