William Patrick Roberts (5 June 1895 – 20 January 1980) was a British painter.
In the years before the First World War Roberts was a pioneer, among English artists, in his use of abstract images. In later years he described his approach as that of an "English Cubist". In the First World War he served as a gunner on the Western Front, and in 1918 became an official war artist. Roberts's first one-man show was at the Chenil Gallery in London in 1923, and a number of his paintings from the twenties were purchased by the Contemporary Art Society for provincial galleries in the UK. In the 1930s it could be argued that Roberts was artistically at the top of his game; but, although his work was exhibited regularly in London and, increasingly, internationally, he always struggled financially. This situation became worse during the Second World War – although Roberts did carry out some commissions as a war artist.
Roberts is probably best remembered for the large, complex and colourful compositions that he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy summer exhibition from the 1950s until his death. He had a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1965, and was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1966. There has recently been a revival of interest in the work of this artist who always worked outside the mainstream.
Roberts was born on 5 June 1895 in Hackney, London to Edward Roberts, a carpenter, and Emma Roberts (née Collins). The third of four children, Roberts maternal grandmother was from Cork whilst his mother was potentially of Irish descent.
From an early age Roberts showed an outstanding talent for drawing, and this was encouraged by his parents and by his school teachers. He left school at the age of 14 and took up an apprenticeship with the advertising firm of Sir Joseph Causton Ltd, intending to become a poster designer. He attended evening classes at Saint Martin's School of Art in London and won a London County Council scholarship to the Slade School of Art – freeing him from the obligations of his apprenticeship. He joined the Slade in 1911, studying under Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer. His contemporaries at the Slade included a number of brilliant young students, among them Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Bernard Meninsky. The Slade's emphasis on the importance of drawing and sound structuring of composition would inform Roberts's later work. In 1912 he won the Slade's Melville Nettleship prize for Figure Composition. He then spent the summer at Bourton, near Shrivenham, as a guest of Cyril Kendall Butler, a committee member of the Contemporary Art Society, who regularly accommodated and subsequently often purchased works by many of Roberts's Slade teachers, such as Steer and Tonks.
Roberts was intrigued by Post-Impressionism and Cubism, an interest fuelled by his friendships at the Slade (in particular with Bomberg) as well as by his travels in France and Italy after leaving the Slade in 1913. Later in 1913 he joined Roger Fry's Omega Workshops for three mornings a week. The ten shillings a time that Omega paid enabled him to create challenging Cubist-style paintings such as The Return of Ulysses (now owned by the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham). After leaving Omega he was taken up by Wyndham Lewis, who was forming a British alternative to Futurism. Ezra Pound had suggested the name Vorticism, and Roberts's work was featured in both editions of the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST. Roberts was a signatory to the Vorticist Manifesto that appeared in the first edition of the magazine. Roberts himself preferred the description "Cubist" for his work of this period. Two large-scale oil paintings exhibited in the 1917 Penguin Club Vorticist exhibition in New York, and purchased by John Quinn, were subsequently lost, but the radical nature of Roberts's "Cubist style" is evidenced by The Toe Dancer (owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the recently rediscovered Boxers – both exhibited with the London Group in 1915.
In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery as a gunner, serving on the Western Front in the Ypres sector, north of the Menin Road and at Arras. Having been on active service for the best part of two years, he successfully applied to the Canadian War Records Office for a commission to paint a large-scale war subject. In April 1918 he returned to London as an official war artist, with the proviso that the work should not be in the Cubist style. The outcome of the commission was The First German Gas Attack at Ypres, a powerful expressionist work that is on permanent display in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Roberts was subsequently commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, for whom he painted A Shell Dump, France (1918–19), now in the Imperial War Museum collection along with twelve watercolour drawings of his experiences at the front They rival the bitterness and social realism of the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz. In 1978 Roberts published a memoir of his experiences at the front – 4.5 Howitzer Gunner RFA: Memories of the War to End War 1914–1918.
Roberts had met Sarah Kramer (1900–92) in 1915 through her brother Jacob Kramer, who also had studied at the Slade. Roberts had been writing to Sarah from the front, and shortly after the war was over they set up home together and had a son, John David Roberts (1919–95). They moved into rented rooms in Fitzrovia and were married in 1922. Roberts exhibited with Wyndham Lewis's Group X, and Osbert Sitwell was an early patron.
Alongside his dramatic Cubist work, Roberts was a talented portrait painter. He honed his skills with portraits of Sarah – she would be his model and muse for the next 60 years. In 1923, while Roberts was preparing for a one-man show at the Chenil Gallery, Chelsea, the artist Colin Gill put Roberts in touch with T. E. Lawrence, who commissioned a series of portraits for his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Finally shaking off his association with Wyndham Lewis, Roberts had evolved a unique and highly recognisable 'English Cubist' style. His subject matter turned to urban life in London with paintings such as Bank Holiday in the Park and At the Hippodrome, which were exhibited with the London Group, and The Cinema – later acquired by the Tate Gallery. At this stage his oeuvre was quite broad, including scenes from 'Greek Mythology [and] Christian Mythology', as he put it. Lawrence commissioned further illustrations and decorations for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and there were also commissions of literary portraits and cover designs for private presses – such as a portrait of H. E. Bates for the New Coterie magazine in 1927. It was the purchase of a number of his paintings by the Contemporary Art Society for major provincial art galleries that kept Roberts financially afloat. He supplemented his income by teaching a life class with Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Art for one day a week from 1925 – a post he held until 1960. Towards the end of the twenties his work became less down-beat. For example, The Tea Garden (1928) and The Chess Players (1929) provide a light take on social interaction and were perfectly in tune with the fashionable Art Deco style.
In the 1930s the angular style of Roberts's earlier work was replaced by a rounder, more sculptural approach. This change in style is, for example, apparent in the double portrait of John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Keynes became an important patron of Roberts through the London Artists' Association, and the paintings that Keynes purchased are now in the collection of King's College, Cambridge. While Roberts was critical of the financial support that he received from the London Artists' Association, it is difficult to imagine how the family would have survived without this patronage. Later he would describe the thirties as "the years of economic struggle". A number of striking large-scale canvases were undertaken in the early thirties, such as The Masks (1934) and The Playground (The Gutter) (1934–5), both works being exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and in New York. Despite their financial position the family occasionally took holidays: they travelled to Spain for the first time in the early 1930s and went on a cycling holiday to Brighton that apparently inspired Les Routiers. Andrew Heard suggests that Roberts may have used a French title for this work as a nod towards the work of Fernand Léger, whose "tubist" forms have some similarity to Roberts's figures.