The Dove, study

'[Roberts'] figures often seem automatons, and yet there is something touching, poignant, paradoxical about them. There is usually a curious flatness about his figures, which nevertheless seem mountains of flesh. His painting and drawings are pervaded by rhythms, as people disport on swings in the playground, prune trees, fly kites, and so on. Roberts thinks seriously about the 'art of making a picture tell a story', and even at his most abstract, those vivid dynamic lines told of men and machines, of combat and human conflict. When a Roberts picture 'takes off', when he combines his wit, which he often covers with a cloak of deliberate banality, his underlying melancholy, his humour and his affection for his human creatures into one dazzlingly rhythmic composition, the results have a fresh vitality that nudges the spectator' (M. Vaizey, 'Review of the Hamet Gallery exhibition in 1973', Financial Times, 21 April 1973).

We are grateful to David Cleall and Bob Davenport for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.