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Paul George Konody was born in Budapest in 1872 and educated in Vienna before settling in London in 1889. From 1900 to 1902 he was editor of The Artist, and he was later an art critic for The Observer and the Daily Mail before the First World War. In 1914 he was one of three critics to be ‘blessed’ by Wyndham Lewis in Blast magazine No.1, and in 1917 he played an important role in Roberts being commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund to paint the large-scale The First German Gas Attack at Ypres in 1918. He died in 1933.

This is one of the few pictures by Roberts with overt political content, but its significance is obscure. It appears to show people being sworn into the ‘Black and Tans’, the paramilitary force specially recruited (from unemployed veterans among others) to suppress rebellion against British rule in Ireland. The map of Ireland on the wall is captioned ‘British possessions marked red.’ The men on the right are holding up their commission papers.

‘A portrait of one of the artist’s brothers, who worked in a stockbroker’s office and died young’ – Tate Gallery 1965 catalogue. In the 1921 England and Wales census, WR’s brother Joseph (b. 1903) appears as a stockbroker’s clerk employed by T. G. Washington & Co. of Copthall Court, EC.

Sarah Roberts with her mother, Cecilia Kramer. The notes prepared with the cooperation of Sarah and John Roberts in the National Portrait Gallery 1984 catalogue say that ‘(William) Roberts was very fond of his mother-in-law, Cecilia Kramer. She had tremendous character and intellect, thinking nothing of translating Russian poets into Yiddish.

Frontal head and chest portrait of the artist’s wife, Sarah Roberts. The subject is a young woman with thick, dark hair in a short bob; she wears a plain round neck dress and her head is turned looking off to the left. The subject sits with her body facing the viewer, against a plain indistinct background.