William Roberts was born on 5 June 1895 at Hackney in London. He was the son of a carpenter. In 1909 he took up an apprenticeship with the advertising firm Sir Joseph Causton Ltd, intending to become a poster designer and attended evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art. He won a London County Council Scholarship to the Slade in 1910. His contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and David Bomberg. Roberts never lost the clarity of design that his early poster-designing experience appears to have instilled. He thrived at the Slade, executing a tempera wall painting under Professor Henry Tonks’ supervision for a Fulham Girls’ Club (1911) and winning a Slade Scholarship (1912). Like Bomberg, he was fascinated by Post-Impressionism and Cubism, an interest fortified in 1913, when he left the Slade and travelled in France and Italy. Such paintings from this period as The Return of Ulysses (1914) show his determination to simplify his figures and to adopt an aerial viewpoint that reduced the entire picture to a flat, angular pattern. After a brief period at the Omega Workshops, Roberts was contacted by Wyndham Lewis, who borrowed two of his pictures to hang at the Rebel Art Centre. In one of these, Dancers (lost), the figures were treated mechanistically. The influence of Léger became detectable in Roberts’s work, and he was at that stage clearly in sympathy with Bomberg’s innovations. However, Roberts showed a sturdy independence, viewing the life around him with a Hogarthian eye for the antics of London’s inhabitants. In one of his most remarkable early pictures, The Toe Dancer (1914; V&A), a performance at an artist’s commune in Ormonde Terrace, is transformed into an eerie ritual. The machine-like structure of the dancer’s body demonstrates how close Roberts came to Vorticism. He was one of the signatories to the first issue of Blast, which also reproduced some of his work. Because all the large and ambitious paintings that he executed during the Vorticist period are lost, one has to look to an elaborate watercolour study for Two-step (1915; London, BM) to find out what his work was really like. In it he used flaring colours and block-like forms, which threaten to overwhelm the dancers. The figures are still discernible, but Roberts implies that humanity has become embedded in the machine-like structure of the modern city. He displayed the canvas of Two-step at the Vorticist Exhibition of June 1915 and subsequently participated in the Vorticist show of January 1917 in New York. In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Artillery, serving on the Western Front. The following year, he was recruited by the War Office as an official war artist. His experiences at the front shifted the direction of his work, and like the other Vorticists, he returned to London with a more representational outlook. His chaotic The First German Gas Attack at Ypres (1918) was executed as an official Canadian commission and makes his condemnation of war’s horror clear. In the 1920s he developed into an interpreter of city life treating his predominantly working-class subjects with humour and dignity. In November 1923 he held his first one-man show at the Chenil Gallery, London and two years later, he became a visiting teacher at the Central School of Art in London, where he taught (excepting the war years) until 1960. Alongside his scenes of urban life, he produced notable portraits, including the double portrait of John Maynard Keynes and his Wife Lydia Lopokova (1932). It demonstrates how responsive he could be to sympathetic commissions, although on the whole, he concentrated on portraits of his wife Sarah, in a multitude of moods and guises. The occasional pictures he executed for the War Artists’ Committee did not lead to further commissions and so, resident in Oxford, images of punting holiday-makers replaced his former preoccupation with metropolitan life. On his return to London, he painted large-scale canvasses such as Trooping the Colour (1959), a depiction of brazen pageantry, accompanied by a disturbing awareness of the dehumanising power of army life. Roberts also retained a vivid memory of his involvement with Vorticism: The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (1962) was an affectionate reconstruction of a boisterous Vorticist supper-party. In later years, his main outlet was the RA, where he was elected ARA in 1966 (on the casting vote of PRA Sir Charles Wheeler) and continued to show monumental urban scenes until his death on 20 January 1980. The Methodist Church’s collection of modern Christian art is usually stored at Oxford Brookes University. Roberts is represented by a powerful Crucifixion from the early 1920s. It is unusual because, instead of placing the three crucified figures in a line, with Christ in the centre as the Gospels record, Roberts has grouped them on the right of the painting in a tight triangle. Yet, Christ remains central, whether viewed from left or right. Roberts’ The Kitchen may be seen above.