Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, U.K.

Literature
William Roberts, Paintings and Drawings by William Roberts R.A., London, privately printed, 1976, pl.2 (ill.)

The outbreak of war in September 1939 gave William Roberts a much-needed opportunity. With the turmoil abroad came a great degree of personal upheaval in having to relocate the family and find new work, however, the conflict also brought about new subject matter that favoured his figurative style, which had spent much of the 1930s in the shadow of Abstraction (epitomised by the Unit One movement and spearheaded by Paul Nash and his contemporaries). In 1940, with the growing threat of invasion and bombing, William and Sarah Roberts moved out of London and settled in Marston, a suburb of Oxford on the banks of the River Cherwell. The locality provided rich inspiration including a gypsy encampment around the corner from their home and the river with its punting, fishing and riverside picnics offered the mixture of nature and human activity that Roberts liked best.

Painted in 1943, the present work is a tightly composed composition held together by a series of diagonals that guide the eye in a zig zag across the picture plane. Punting poles, human limbs, reflections in the water and the cows' backs all serve this purpose and make for an ingenious design that the artist first trialled in a watercolour and three pencil studies. The serene pastoral scene brings to mind the work of the Old Masters and comparisons have been drawn with Poussin and Andrew Gibbon Williams states 'The calculated deliberation with which Roberts orchestrates his multiple figure groups is analogous to that of the French master; it is as if Seventeenth-Century Classicism is being strained through the sieve of Cubism' (William Roberts, An English Cubist, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2004, p.105). This effect can also be seen in another tour-de-force from this Oxford period Parson's Pleasure (Private Collection, 1944).

Roberts favoured complex compositions which often showed popular leisure pursuits and here we have an all-female group of punters who are making steady progress through this calm, pastoral scene, the river apparently so still that their limbs and those of the cows which stand and rest above are reflected with mirror-like accuracy in the cool water. Roberts has succeeded in distilling a sense of tranquillity, and conjures the impression of a hot but still summer's day. He also invokes a sense of harmony, of human activity and the natural world co-existing peacefully side by side, each enjoying the pleasures of the countryside, as the cows look on with a benevolent air, mostly at rest, either chewing the cud or idly grazing. The colour palette of the present work is also especially rich, with the whole scene infused with a sense of warmth. The cows are sensitively and generously rendered in warm umber, inky black and with patches of creamy white, while the sky is a warm, glowing orange, the cows resting in the shade of the tree. A man rests on a gate in the background, perhaps in respite from the heat of the day, while the women keep cool in swimsuits in rich shades of teal, maroon and brown. In this very tightly-constructed, complex composition, Roberts effectively shows us a snapshot of life in the countryside as he must have observed it, conveying a sense of this hot, still summer's day with masterful ease.

Please see the introduction to the preceding lot for further detail on the provenance of this work. We are grateful to David Cleall and Bob Davenport for information provided about this lot.