William Roberts, R.A.

Acquired by St John Hutchinson circa 1915 and thence by descent to the present owner

London, The New English Art Club, Summer 1914;
London, London Group, Second Exhibition, March 1915.

The following condition report was prepared by Jane McAusland ACR FIIC, Conservator and Restorer of Art on Paper, Nether Hall Barn, Old Newton, Nr Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 4PP: Support This impressive drawing on a sheet of wove paper is fully laid down onto a board, in my opinion, contemporary with the artist. The condition of the sheet is good, although there is typical time staining but there are no apparent damages other than a couple of small creases on the left and right of the collaged note, upper right. The board shows old tapes on the verso. Medium The medium is in a good strong condition and in my opinion the ink may have been blue, originally a writing ink used at this time, but now changed to brown in most places with only slight traces of the blue still showing. This change is due to the nature of the ink and probably a high iron content. There is extensive under drawing and artist's corrections, which gives the work another dimension. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In 1957 William Roberts published a slim but tantalising book, Some Early Abstract & Cubist Work 1913-1920. At first sight it appears to be an innocuous enough work, neatly typeset and in a limited edition of three hundred, but it represented an important staging point in the reappraisal of what can still be seen as Britain's lost modernists. The previous year the Tate Gallery had staged Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, the first significant exhibition to examine the brief but important period just prior to the First World War when a small group of young British artists had begun to produce some of the most powerful and forward-looking paintings and sculpture yet seen. Unfortunately, the Tate exhibition rather fostered an impression that Vorticism, as the movement was known, was essentially the work and creation of Wyndham Lewis, with his contemporaries placed a good distance in his wake. Roberts, not surprisingly, was deeply offended by this stance, and took up the cause on behalf of his fellows who he felt were being unjustifiably cast as Lewis' followers rather than joint participants in a crucial moment in British art.

However, Roberts had a problem. In order to demonstrate the contributions of those he felt had been cast in Lewis' shadow by the Tate exhibition, he had of course to make reference to the art itself. For all those associated with Vorticism, the roll-call of lost, destroyed and otherwise untraced work was huge. Very few major, or even minor, works survived, and the critical neglect in the four decades since the crucial exhibitions of 1914-15 had meant that even those works that were still extant were often lying un-regarded and out of sight. For Roberts himself, the toll the years had taken could be no better illustrated by the fact that of the examples he published in Some Early Abstract & Cubist Work 1913-20, none of the pieces that cover the vital 1913-15 period were known by him to still exist, their place being taken in the book by reproductions from older publications. He summed this up in the heart-breaking sentence, 'Of my abstract pictures, these reproductions are all that have survived of the paintings and drawings done during the years 1913-4-5.' (William Roberts, Some Early Abstract & Cubist Work 1913-20, Canale Publications, London 1957, p.3).

Happily, the continuing reappraisal of this crucial phase of British art in the intervening years has meant that we are now in a position to evaluate a slightly larger body of work by Roberts from the 1913-15 period, but it still remains an extremely small corpus, and thus the reappearance of Boxers, unexhibited and unpublished since its appearance in the second London Group exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1915, must be regarded not only as one of the most significant additions to our knowledge of Roberts' early career for well over a generation, but also as a substantial supplement to our overall awareness of work in the Vorticist sphere.

A deeply complex composition, our understanding of Boxers beyond the title of this drawing is aided by the unusual addition of a collage element, perhaps cut from a programme or flyer, announcing the boxing match between Kid Lewis and Jim Berry at Premierland, a leading sporting venue in Whitechapel, East London, and this also helps us to date the drawing. The two fighters only met twice, first in 1912 and again in March 1914 which must therefore be the occasion to which Roberts points us. At this date, Lewis, known as 'The Aldgate Sphinx', was British and European featherweight champion, and indeed could well have been personally known to Roberts. During the 1913-15 period, Roberts and David Bomberg were very close friends, and as well as sharing similar backgrounds from the East End of London, Bomberg's brother Mo was a boxer who knew Lewis. Joseph Leftwich, a friend of the period remembered: 'We knew Kid Lewis very well, he was the hero of the East End' (Richard Cork, Bomberg, Yale University Press, London and New Haven 1988, p.48). Indeed it is to his friend Bomberg that Roberts credits his own move towards 'Cubism':

'I became an abstract painter through the influence of the French Cubists...An additional stimulant to my interest in abstract art was the example of David Bomberg a friend and fellow pupil at the Slade School who had begun to produce some fine cubist compositions' (William Roberts, ibid., p.4)

Indeed, a comparison of the work that Bomberg was producing in 1913-14 with Roberts' known pieces of that date does demonstrate such connections, and as we are fortunate enough to have major oils and their preliminary studies by Bomberg that treat multi-figure sporting or physical type compositions to examine, most notably Ju-Jitsu and The Mud Bath (both Tate, London), it is instructive to look at Boxers in this context. We can thus see the influence of the ethos and milieu of Bomberg's work coming together with the density of the Vorticist compositions of Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth and Frederick Etchells. Certainly the abstract complexity of The Boxers is of a level that is matched by few of Roberts' known works and indicates just how short his period of working at this level of abstraction was. One can only assume that its first exhibition at the N.E.A.C. in the summer of 1914, by then a rather conservative exhibiting forum, would have been the cause of some consternation amongst the older members. Its second, and as far as we are aware last, public showing, at the London Group in March 1915, would have placed it in rather more sympathetic company as it would have been seen alongside Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill (original dismantled), Nevinson's Return to the Trenches (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Wyndham Lewis' The Crowd and Workshop (both Tate, London) and Wadsworth's now lost Rotterdam and Blackpool canvases.

The image itself is one packed with movement, Roberts never letting our eye rest for a moment. We slowly pick out forms that we can read and identify, the characteristic curve of a boxing glove, the folds of a towel, the bend of elbow and knee. We are of course now helped in our reading of Boxers by our hindsight knowledge of one of Roberts' greatest post-WWI paintings, The Interval Before Round Ten (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) in seeing the movement in the ring but the fact remains that Boxers is abstracted from reality to such a degree that it has moved almost entirely beyond the actual subject that spawned it.

It is worth remembering that when he produced Boxers, Roberts was just nineteen years old. Fresh from art school, he and his fellows were in the heady world of a tiny enclave of modernist enthusiasm, like foreign agents in the traditionalist heartland. A visit to the Royal Academy in 1914, just as Roberts was carefully packing Boxers to send it to its first exhibition at the supposedly avant-garde N.E.A.C., would have revealed wall after wall of tired Victorian cliché. In producing such work he and his fellows must have felt themselves at the very cutting edge. Look into The Boxers and imagine that you too are nineteen years of age, fresh out of art school, and going with your friends to see a boxing match with a local champion fighting, a local hero, perhaps someone you even know. This drawing is that night, this drawing is the movement, the excitement, the ebb and flow, the roar of the crowd, the heady excitement of action, of vigour, of youth. You are there, you are baying for the knockdown blow. This is what the Vorticist artists wanted to create in their art, the now, the real, the world of the undeniable, the world of the essential. Is it any wonder that the slaughter of the Western Front dashed such idealism into the mud?

It will soon be a whole century since The Boxers was drawn by the young William Roberts. What other relic of the England of the years before WWI can still feel so alive and so potent?

St John Hutchinson (1884-1942), the first owner of the present work and an eminent criminal barrister and patron of the arts, was an early supporter of William Roberts and his Slade School generation of friends and became particularly close to Mark Gertler. His support of the young urged his friend Henry Tonks to enquire: 'I shall be much obliged if you can put any one on to William Roberts 32 Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road WC. I have done what I can and have tried to interest people in him. I cannot tell him if he changes his style he may sell something, so it is difficult. After all one must not try and change the faith of an artist. I have in the past and as long as I did suggest a return to nature – was wrong, I believe he has a great deal in him' (letter from Henry Tonks to St John Hutchinson, 26^th April 1920). In 1910, Hutchinson married Mary Barnes and the couple became central characters in the fashionable literary and artistic circles of the period, immortalised in Tonks' Saturday Night at the Vale (1928-29, Tate Collection) where the couple are depicted alongside Philip Wilson Steer, Tonks himself and George Moore reading from his manuscript for Aphrodite in Aulis (published in 1930). Mary was a cousin of Lytton Strachey and thus the Hutchinsons also had strong connections with Bloomsbury becoming early patrons of the Omega workshops with rooms in two of their London homes decorated by Vanessa Bell. Mary also sat for both Bell and Duncan Grant and later developed a complex friendship with Virginia Woolf and was, as Hermione Lee points out, 'the main inspiration for the febrile socialite Jinny in The Waves' (H. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996, p.383).