signed, titled ‘The Artist’ and further inscribed under the mount
Further information »
Artist and Wife, c. 1940
Provenance:
Acquired directly from the artist by Wilfrid A Evill, April 1942 for £25.00 by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963
Exhibition History:
British Council, Allied Institutes, 1943 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, v. 126, p. 42);
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, watercolours and sculptures, April – May 1961 (illustrated as the Artist and his Wife in the exhibition catalogue, part III, section 2, no. 17);
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid A. Evill Memorial Exhibition, June – August 1965 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 159);
London, Tate Gallery, William Roberts ARA Retrospective Exhibition, November – December 1965 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 174). This exhibition toured with the Arts Council Tour to Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester;
London, Anthony d’Offay, William Roberts, Drawings and Watercolours, November – December 1980 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 31);
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: The Art of William Roberts, 24 September – 18 December 2011
Literature:
William Roberts’ contemporaries from the Slade School of Art included Dora Carrington and Stanley Spencer. Roberts married Sarah Kramer, sister of Jacob Kramer, who appeared a number of times in his portrait paintings. Although often described as a recluse and timorous, after seeing Wyndham Lewis’ work in a group exhibition at the Tate, Roberts produced his Vortex Pamphlets in response to his anger at being classified as an ‘Other Vorticist’ and lower in the pecking order to Lewis as an artist. The present work is a satire on lady artists and their husbands. Dating from the early years of the war, Roberts painted a smaller and slightly less finished study for it in watercolour, he also made yet another watercolour of an intermediate size before embarking on this, the final version. The smaller watercolour study for this work was exhibited at the Albemarle Gallery in London (1989).
