William Roberts, R.A.

Acquired from the Artist by Count Van den Heuvel
Sale, Sotheby's London, 4th November 1959, lot 71, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill for £220.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

London, Cooling Galleries, London Artist's Association, London Artists' Association General Exhibition, January 1933;
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, International Exhibition, October - December 1934, cat. no.155;
London, Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery, William Roberts, March 1938, cat. no.11;
New York, British Pavilion, World's Fair, Contemporary British Art, 1939-40, cat. no.109, illustrated, with a US and Canada tour;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part I- section 3) cat. no.3 (as Masques);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfird Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.145;
London, Tate Gallery, William Roberts ARA: Retrospective Exhibition, 20th November - 19th December 1965, cat. no.49, with Arts Council Tour to Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

The Times, 13th January 1933;
John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore, vol. 2 (1956 edn), Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, illustrated pl.28;
Andrew Heard, William Roberts (1895-1980), (exh.cat.), Hatton Gallery, New Castle, 2004, p.89;
William Roberts Society Newsletter, March 2011 (unpaginated).

The colours are much richer, deeper in tone and more vibrant than the catalogue illustration suggests. Original canvas. There is some old frame abrasion about the edges, with a few small spots of resultant paint loss. This abrasion has also caused a few small tears to the canvas along the very upper edge, where the canvas pulls over the stretcher bar. These abrasions are not visible when the work is framed. The paint surface has recently been cleaned and is in generally excellent condition. There is an extremely tiny minor spot of lifting paint to the saddle of the toy horse and a minor line of very faint craquelure to the knees of the kneeling man. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence about the edges, which appears to correspond to the aforementioned frame abrasion. There are a few tiny specks of fluorescence to the mother's stomach and to the foreground near the toy horse, which may be very old retouching. Other pigments fluoresce which are apparently the hand of the artist. Held in a gilt composite frame with a grey cloth inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'The picture of the exhibition . . . is "Masks," by Mr. William Roberts. In a close-packed composition it represents a group of Cockneys, on a festive occasion, noisily absorbed in the joke of a toy horse belonging to a half-flattered and half-outraged little boy. From the presence of a real horse in the background it may be assumed that the joke is about "odds." The pictorial interest is in the agitated internal movement, a raucous movement set up within the group by the play of masks and hands, and in the harsh but somehow pleasing colour. Everything seems to be dominated by the hoarseness of the implied voices.' (The Times, 13 January 1933)

While The Times  reviewer identified the figures as a group Cockney revellers, the interaction between the wonderful range of remarkable and lively characters seen in the present work remains somewhat difficult to decipher. As masks have commonly been used as symbols of duplicity, perhaps this is Roberts' intention; the masks certainly appear rather more menacing than jovial, the dog on the lead and the pose and attitude of the little boy reflecting the undercurrent of unease. It is partially this element of curiosity, our desire to decipher the scene, that draws the viewer back to the work again and again, and Masks is undoubtedly one of the artist's most intriguing and multifaceted paintings to ever appear at auction.

Roberts felt it rang false to purely invent a subject and he never committed to a composition without it having some source, either from his observations of everyday life, from literature or scripture, or from his studies of the arts. He was a disciplined artist, serious about maintaining a steady stream of output, and devoted a great deal of time to seeking out items of interest that would spark his imagination.

A J P Taylor, a neighbour of the family, noted that Roberts spent most of his days walking and observing in London:

'If he needed a note of something that caught his fancy or interest he would find a scrap of paper in his pocket and make a pattern of a few lines...The scrap of paper was added to the pile he had collected for many years ...After each finished work he would go through this pile and select one, and not always the latest, to start whatever suited him at the moment. He didn't use a sketchbook. It was quite an adventure going through his piles and try to guess which would come next.' (quoted in Andrew Heard, William Roberts, 2004, p.56)

Perhaps inspired by an encounter on such a walk, Roberts clearly had some concept in mind before embarking on Masks, ambitious in its scale, subject and compositional complexity.  Typical of Roberts' method, an intricate preparatory drawing for the present work exists (Sale Bonhams, 12th March 2002, lot 52, currently in a Private Collection), as well as a detail drawing of three of the figures (illustrated on the cover of Robert's memoir Early Years, 1982). We also know his son John was dispatched to the store to buy a range of masks from which the artist could work. These same masks appear again, their colouring slightly altered, in a work painted twenty years later in 1953 entitled Masked Revels (Fig 1, sold in these rooms, 26^th November 1997, lot 70).

John was apparently the inspiration for the figure of the cherubic little boy in the red patent leather shoes (see Ibid, p.89). When John was four he was dropped and had to undergo a very serious operation. While convalescing he picked up the habit of thumb-sucking, and William was particularly struck by this act of self-comfort in the face of pain and anxiety, which comes across quite clearly in the present work.

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