William Roberts (painter) - Later Recognition and The Fate of His Estate

Later Recognition and The Fate of His Estate

In 1961 Roberts received an award from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 'in recognition of his artistic achievement and his outstanding service to British painting'. In that same year he began painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (completed 1962; now in the Tate Gallery), a nostalgic recollection of a boisterous Vorticist gathering in 1915. A major retrospective of his work, organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain, opened at the Tate Gallery in 1965, and a smaller version was also shown in Newcastle and Manchester. Roberts was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1966 (he had been an associate member since 1958), and he continued to depict large-scale urban scenes in his paintings until his death in 1980.

After his son had died intestate, The Guardian revealed that the Treasury Solicitor had control of a large number of works by Roberts, which it refused to lend to an exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. Since then it has been announced that 117 of these works have been allocated to the Tate Gallery in lieu of inheritance tax, and the Tate will also house the remainder; a number of the works allocated to the Tate went on display at Tate Britain in May 2012, and will remain on display until March 2013.

Roberts's account of his early years (written in 1977) appeared posthumously, in 1982, and in 2004 William Roberts: An English Cubist by Andrew Gibbon Williams (Lund Humphries), the standard monograph on this painter, was published.