Scottish painter and set designer Robert MacBryde was BOTD in 1913. Born in Maybole, Ayrshire to a working-class family, he worked in a factory as a teenager before moving to Glasgow in 1932 to study at the Glasgow School of Art. He formed a relationship with fellow student Robert Colquhoun, who became his lifelong romantic and professional partner. Known as The Two Roberts, they studied and travelled in France and Italy throughout the 1930s, returning to England at the outbreak of World War Two. They settled in London, forming a friendship circle including the artists Francis Bacon, John Minton and Lucian Freud and writers Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart and Frank Norman. Influenced by Cubist and Modernist art, MacBryde held his first solo exhibition in London in 1943. He and Colquhoun also designed theatrical sets for actor-director John Gielgud and ballet choreographer Léonide Massine. Their careers faltered in the 1950s with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, and they descended into poverty and alcoholism. After Colquhoun’s death in 1962, MacBryde moved to Ireland, where he shared a house with writer and fellow alcoholic Patrick Kavanagh. He died in 1966, aged 52. Largely forgotten at his death, he and Colquhoun’s reputations were exhumed by Roger Bristow’s 2009 biography The Last Bohemians. Their relationship formed the basis of Damian Barr‘s 2025 novel The Two Roberts, sparking further interest in their life and work and an exhibition of their work at Charleston House, the former home of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.