AN ENGLISH CUBIST

WILLIAM ROBERTS:

Trooping the Colour + studies

Illustration © The Estate of John David Roberts. Catalogue information based on the catalogue raisonné by David Cleall. For this and full details of the exhibitions cited, see the links below. Any auction prices quoted may not include all fees and taxes, such as VAT and Artist's Resale Right charges.

Trooping the Colour – study, 1958–9
Pencil, 20.3 cm x 30.5 cm

PROVENANCE: Estate of John David Roberts, accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Tate 2007 (T12645)

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Trooping the colour -- study

Trooping the Colour – study, 1958–9
Pencil, 30.5 cm x 46.3 cm

PROVENANCE: Ernest Cooper > Sotheby's 2 May 1990 (estimate £3,000–£4,000) > Sotheby's 21 June 1995 (£2,415) > ? > Bonhams 22 Nov. 2000 (estimate £1,000–£2,000) > ? > Christie's 4 Dec. 2002 (£4,935) > Piccadilly Gallery (2004) > Bloomsbury Auctions 13 Nov. 2008 (estimate £6,000–£8,000; unsold) > Dreweatts 18 May 2010 (£7,200) > Anthony Smith CBE > ? (by descent) > Bonhams 19 June 2024 (estimate £20,000–£30,000; unsold)
EXHIBITION HISTORY: Tate Gallery 1965, Worthing 1972, Artmonsky Arts 2001, Newcastle 2004

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Trooping the Colour -- study

Trooping the Colour – study, 1958–9
Watercolour, 20.5 cm x 30.2 cm

PROVENANCE: Ms Elizabeth Gawne (1965) > the Roberts family > Estate of John David Roberts (held in Tate store, 2014)
EXHIBITION HISTORY: Tate Gallery 1965

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Trooping the Colour, 1958–9
Oil on canvas, 182.9 cm x 274.3 cm

PROVENANCE: Purchased from the artist by Ernest Cooper (who hung it in the juice bar of the Church Street, W8, branch of his London Health Centre) 1959 > Sotheby’s 21 Nov. 1962 (unsold) > Tate Gallery (T03248, purchased 1981)
EXHIBITION HISTORY: Royal Academy 1959 (£1,500), Tate Gallery 1965 and tour, Worthing 1972, Royal Academy (2) 1977, National Portrait Gallery 1986, Newcastle 2004. 'Mr. Roberts's "Trooping the Colour" is the sort of painting which possibly no visitor [to the 1959 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition] between now and August will admit to liking; it is rigid, schematic, and harsh in colour, and the figures are characteristically puppet-like. But what subject could be more fitted to puppet-like depiction than soldiers on ceremonial parade, what patterns better adapted to geometric regularity than those made by serried ranks of identical uniforms, marching feet, and sloping bayonets? The painting, in a word, triumphs by logic; it is a complicated, highly skilful achievement which makes the most of an heraldic subject in heraldic manner' – The Times, 1 May 1959. But see the Daily Mail of 1 May 1959 for controversy about this painting, and Roberts, My 'Trooping the Colour'. The Daily Mail of 2 May 1959 contained an Emmwood cartoon of two Guardsmen in bearskin caps standing in front of Roberts's picture at the RA, with one of them saying, ' … not only seventeen errors of dress Fanshawe, but I'll wager the feller painted it needs a blawsted hair-cut.'