William Roberts, R.A.

Acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill December 1955 for £18.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, New Chenil Galleries, Multi-National Exhibition of Works by British, American, German, Swiss and Mexican Artists, 1926, cat. no.42;
London, The Leicester Galleries, Second Exhibition of the London Artists' Association, November 1927, cat. no.38;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part I- section 2) cat. no.7 (as Wolves and Men);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.149 (as Wolves and Men);
London, The Tate Gallery,  William Roberts ARA Retrospective Exhibition, 20th November - 19th December 1965, cat. no.26 (as Dogs of the Beni Hillal (an Arabian legend)), with Arts Council Tour to Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Andrew Gibbon Williams, William Roberts: An English Cubist, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2004, p.71;
William Roberts Society Newsletter, March 2011, illustrated on the back cover.

Original canvas. There are artist's pinholes in the corners. There are areas of minor paint separation, visible upon close inspection, including to a few spots on the central figures and the wolves. Generally the work is in good original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals pigments that fluoresce which are the hand of the artist, but no apparent signs of retouching. Held under glass in a gilt wood frame; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The visual style of the present work relates quite closely to Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple that is in the collection of the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull. Both paintings were apparently painted around the  same time in Fitzroy Street, while Roberts was working on illustrations for T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Lawrence (i.e. Lawrence of Arabia) was a British soldier stationed in Jordan during the revolt against the Ottoman Turks in 1917. His autobiographical account of his experiences, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was compiled upon his return to England in 1919. When the volume was eventually published it was in fact the third complete draft. Lawrence lost the first when he misplaced his briefcase at a railway station, and having destroyed all of his war time notes he attempted to rewrite the 250,000 word tome from memory. The result was an even more expansive account, which Lawrence was not satisfied with, and upon rewriting the work for a third time, he burned this second draft.

In 1920 Roberts was alerted by former Slade schoolmate Colin Gill that Lawrence was seeking artists to illustrate an abridged Subscribers Edition of the memoirs. Roberts apparently sought out the former soldier, and having met, he began work on related drawings in 1922, putting his considerable graphic skills to good use. The sumptuous de luxe edition was published in late 1926, with a very limited print run of 200 copies, and also included works by the artist's contemporaries such as Paul Nash, Blair Hughes-Stanton and Augustus John. The following year the Leicester Galleries held a show of the contributors, and the Times declared Roberts the 'hero of the exhibition' (quoted in Andrew Gibbon Williams, William Roberts, 2004, p.56).

While the 1965 Tate retrospective catalogue was unable to identify the passage to which the present work relates, a drawing of this subject was published as a tailpiece of the 1926 edition (p.192). The ink drawing for this tailpiece and a red chalk study are owned by the Houghton Library, Harvard and were exhibited at the T.E. Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1988.

The present work does in fact adhere quite closely to Lawrence's account of a night spent in an old fort in Azark, where he and his party spent a portion of the winter in 1917:

'The first evening we were sitting with the Serahin, Hassan Shah had made the rounds, and the coffee was being pounded by the hearth, when there rose a strange, long wailing sound from the towers outside. Ibn Bani seized me by the arm and held to me, shuddering. I whispered to him, "What is it?" and he gasped that the dogs of the Beni Hillal, the mythical builders of the fort, quested the six towers each night for their dead masters.

We strained to listen. Through Ali's black basalt window-frame crept a rustling, which was the stirring of the night-wind in the withered palms, an intermittent rustling, like English rain on yet-crisp fallen leaves. Then the cries came again and again and again, rising slowly in power, till they sobbed round the walls in deep waves to die away choked and miserable. At such times our men pounded the coffee harder while the Arabs broke into sudden song to occupy their ears against the misfortune. No Bedouin would lie outside in wait for the mystery, and from our windows we saw nothing but the motes of water in the dank air which drove through the radiance of our firelight. So it remained a legend: but wolves or jackals, hyenas, or hunting dogs, their ghost-watch kept our ward more closely than arms could have done' (T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book Six, Chapter 79).

Here, the dogs are not merely legend but are terrifying presences, pressed claustrophobically up against the fort walls. Roberts includes the key features of Lawrence's tale, the thick window frame dramatically dividing the indoor and outdoor realm, the pounding of the coffee, and the man in the background covering his ears, and he also taps into the sense of unease, particularly in the harsh lighting which shadows the men's gestures of fright and curiosity on the walls and floor.

We are grateful to David Cleall for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.