William Roberts was a British artist, sometimes known as the 'English Cubist'.
Born in London Fields, Hackney in 1895, Roberts's artistic ability was evident from an early age, the teachers at his primary school allowed him to devote class time to drawing and eventually his art mistress suggested he be transferred to a school with greater art resources. Upon leaving school Roberts was apprenticed to a commercial art firm and he attended evening classes run by William P. Robins at St Martins School of Art. At fifteen years old, Roberts won a London County Council Scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art where his fellow students included Dora Carrington, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, among many other notable artists.
He won the Melville Nettleship Prize for figure painting composition as well as a further prize for drawing in 1913, the same year he left the Slade. He then spent some time travelling France and Italy, likely further igniting a love for Cubism and Post-Impressionism that had been growing during his time at the Slade fuelled by his friendship with David Bomberg. In these years prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Roberts was seen as a pioneer, among English artists due to the way he used abstract images, later describing himself as an English Cubist. He joined Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, exhibiting with Fry's Grafton Group in 1914. Tensions in the group drew him to Percy Wyndham Lewis instead, who was developing a style of geometric abstraction which was intended to be a British take on Futurism, named 'Vorticism' by Ezra Pound. Roberts' work featured in both editions of the Vorticist magazine BLAST.
By 1916, Roberts had enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery and two years later, while his Brigade was retreating from The Somme, he received a summons from the Canadian War Records Office to return to England to begin work as an official war artist. Following the war, the artist began to exhibit widely, with his first solo exhibition in 1923 and several of his paintings produced in this decade purchased by the Contemporary Art Society for provincial art galleries in the UK. He also became a visiting teacher at the Central School of Art where he continued to teach until 1960, and in 1928 showed at the Venice Biennale for the first time.
Throughout the 1930s, the angular style of Roberts' earlier work was replaced with a more rotund use of line, giving the work a sculptural quality. During the inter-war years, the artist and his wife temporarily relocated to Oxford, where he undertook a few assignments for the War Artists' Advisory Committee. Following their return to London, Roberts expanded the scale and colour of his painting and increased the dramaticism of the subject matter to fit his growing enthusiasm for exhibiting with the Royal Academy, and it is these paintings he is probably best remembered for.
A retrospective of the artist's work was held at the Tate in 1966 and he was elected Royal Academician, he also declined the offer of an OBE the same year. Having lived and worked at 14 St Mark's Crescent, Primrose Hill since 1946, he died there in January 1980.
