In the 1930s it could be argued that Roberts was artistically at the top of his game; but, although his work was exhibited regularly in London and, increasingly, internationally, he always struggled financially.

[2] His contemporaries at the Slade included a number of brilliant young students, among them Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Bernard Meninsky.

[4] He then spent the summer at Bourton, near Shrivenham, as a guest of Cyril Kendall Butler, a committee member of the Contemporary Art Society,[5] who regularly accommodated and subsequently often purchased works by many of Roberts's Slade teachers, such as Steer and Tonks.

The ten shillings a time that Omega paid enabled him to create challenging Cubist-style paintings such as The Return of Ulysses[6] (now owned by the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham).

[11] In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery as a gunner, serving on the Western Front in the Ypres sector, north of the Menin Road and at Arras.

[12] The outcome of the commission was The First German Gas Attack at Ypres, a powerful expressionist work that is on permanent display in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Roberts was subsequently commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, for whom he painted A Shell Dump, France (1918–19), now in the Imperial War Museum collection along with twelve watercolour drawings of his experiences at the front They rival the bitterness and social realism of the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz.

He supplemented his income by teaching a life class with Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Art for one day a week from 1925 – a post he held until 1960.

For example, The Tea Garden (1928)[22] and The Chess Players (1929)[23] provide a light take on social interaction and were perfectly in tune with the fashionable Art Deco style.

[26] While Roberts was critical of the financial support that he received from the London Artists' Association,[27] it is difficult to imagine how the family would have survived without this patronage.

[28] A number of striking large-scale canvases were undertaken in the early thirties, such as The Masks (1934)[29] and The Playground (The Gutter) (1934–5),[30] both works being exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and in New York.

[34] However, he did complete two commissions documenting life on the home front – Munitions Factory (1940)[35] and The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters(1942)[36] – both now in Salford Art Gallery.

Throughout his life he drew inspiration from his surroundings, and a number of watercolour drawings from this period show rural scenes on the River Cherwell and a nearby Gypsy camp.

[37] In 1946 he and Sarah returned to London and took a room at 14 St Mark's Crescent, a house in multiple occupancy backing on to the Regent's Canal, near Primrose Hill.

Roberts re-evaluated the Royal Academy as an exhibiting opportunity, as it attracted large and diverse crowds that were generally more interested in representational art than in abstraction, as well as press coverage.

The Temptation of St Anthony (1951),[41] Revolt in the Desert (1952)[42] and The Birth of Venus (1954)[43] dominated the walls of the RA and were a talking point in the press and with the public.

As well as purchasing a large number of these Royal Academy paintings, Cooper commissioned Roberts to design illustrations for his mail-order catalogues and instructional pamphlets.

Roberts was offended that the catalogue "would lead the uninitiated to suppose that the artists designated as 'Other Vorticists' are in some way subservient to Lewis",[46] and published a series of "Vortex Pamphlets",[47] in which he railed against the exhibition, the catalogue, the press coverage and the account of his own career contained in Modern English Painters by the Tate's director, John Rothenstein, which appeared at about the same time.

In 1958 Roberts was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and two years later, when he turned 65, he retired from his one-day-a-week teaching position at the Central School.

A major retrospective of his work, organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and curated by Ronald Alley, opened at the Tate Gallery in 1965, and a smaller version was also shown in Newcastle and Manchester.

[54] Unsurprisingly, in his eighties Roberts's draughtsmanship deteriorated, but he continued working until the end – Donkey Rides[55] was "pinned to his drawing board on the day on which he died [20 Jan.