These form part of a project called The Daughters of Beauty, a series of five paintings of girls dancing, in which Robertson hoped to capture the 'essence of beauty', painted just after his return to Edinburgh from ambulance service in France in 1919. Amongst the models were his wife Cecile (née Walton, daughter of the artist E. A. Walton), her younger sister Margery, Lucy Smith (a ballet dancer), and her sister Dorothy, and several other girls he knew. The pictures date from 1919. The two other paintings were the same height but nearly twice the width (one belongs to the City of Edinburgh and the other is in a private collection) and were intended to be hung individually. These three have been treated as a triptych. His work at this time, though still seen as subversive, had many admirers, as he evolved a new ‘Vorticist’, style which he called ‘expressionism’. 

Robertson was one of the most innovative and brilliant art students of his time, often scandalizing conservative Edinburgh society with his frank and sensual depictions of the female nude. He and his wife were the leading members of the Edinburgh Group. His influences were eclectic and contradictory: Gustave Moreau, and the Pre-Raphaelites, together with the Vorticists, but he also admired the Scottish symbolist painter John Duncan, who kept him at arms length on account of his (unjust) reputation as a 'dangerous and subversive immoralist'.

We are grateful to John Kemplay for his help in cataloguing these paintings.