The original owner of Bathers, Desmond Coke (1897-1931), was a British writer commissioned into the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment in October 1914. At the Western Front, as Adjutant of the Regiment, he was responsible for writing up the Battalion diary. Eventually invalided out of the army after contracting trench fever in May 1916, he went on to write adventure stories for boys under the pseudonym Belinda Blinders. He also collaborated with the artist John Nash, who illustrated his 1921 book, The Nouveau Poor. Coke may well have been friends with William Roberts and will certainly have been aware of the latter’s significant World War I commissions received from the Canadian Memorials Fund and the British Ministry of Information.

Drawn in 1923, it has been suggested (by the William Roberts Society) that Bathers was probably exhibited in Roberts’ first one-man exhibition, Paintings and Drawings by William Roberts at the Chenil Gallery, London in November 1923. An untraced work from this show, titled Sea Frolic, would seem to match Bathers, and further drawings in the exhibition are known to be inscribed with titles which are not consistent with the exhibition catalogue.

Following Coke’s death in 1931, Bathers was offered for sale at Sotheby’s where it disappeared into an unknown collection, until it re-appeared again at auction, in the 1980s. The drawing then entered the collection of Geoffrey Beene (1924-2004), one of New York’s most famous fashion designers in the 1960s and 1970s, who was recognised for his artistic and technical skills. Latterly, it was in the collection of Ruth Artmonsky, gallerist and curator of William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, the Tortoise and the Hare, staged at Ben Uri Gallery, London, and the University Gallery, Leeds, in 2003, in which Bathers featured (cat.no.16).

Commenting on the artist’s Chenil Gallery exhibition in 1923, Gibbon Williams states, ‘Roberts’ first solo exhibition was a heavyweight spectacle. It comprised nearly sixty works – paintings, drawings and prints…Muirhead Bone’s catalogue introduction was especially perspicacious. It pinpointed the very qualities that marked Roberts out from the generality of his contemporaries: his “boldness”, “mordant irony” and “sense of design”. “A strong love of character at it raciest” Bone wrote, “especially where it shades into the grotesque – he presents to us his memories of life in a sharp manner, odd, vivid, and quite his own, whose foundation is a really sterling draughtsmanship.”’1

Whilst Bathers has been lightly squared for transfer, it is possible Roberts abandoned the oil painting. An oil on canvas, titled The Bathers and dated to circa 1925 bears little resemblance to this drawing, in which all of the figures are standing, and appear to be engaged in a loose and joyous procession or dance around the central figure, not dissimilar in compositional design to the right-hand side of The Dance Club (The Jazz Party) painted in the same year and now with Leeds Museums and Galleries, City Art Gallery, Leeds. Whilst it is tempting to draw parallels with Cézanne and his bathers, Roberts doesn’t depict the group of nude figures as a formal exercise as Cézanne would have, but as was often the case with Roberts there seems to be an underlying narrative idea, although intriguingly one that is not explained. That the figures in the drawing are unclothed seem to give Bathers a Dionysian element. However, considering the tailpiece drawings that Roberts produced for Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1925–26 several of them such as A Reluctant Shepherd and Male and Female feature unclothed figures where the nudity seems to be driven purely by design elements rather than any relevance to the narrative. The bodies, arms and legs of the eight figures depicted in Bathers are entwined in a complex arrangement of angles and curves, with a heavy use of pencil and subtle shading, which recalls the artist’s own earlier forays in Cubist experimentation, as seen in his studies on paper for the now lost Two Step (1915).

Referring to Roberts’ work dating from the early 1920s, Gibbon Williams remarks, ‘While fidelity to the visual truth of a specific event is rarely sacrificed to formal requirements, his drawings and paintings of this period are an example of Cubism being manipulated with realistic intent.’2 It is this quasi-Cubist aesthetic which Roberts embraced during the early 1920s which makes Bathers, and other drawings from his significant 1923 Chenil Gallery show so appealing. ,

1.  Andrew Gibbon William, William Roberts, an English Cubist, Lund Humphries, 2004, p.68
2. op. cit. p.60

Desmond Coke
Sotheby’s London, 23 July 1931
Christie’s London, 12 November 1987
Geoffrey Beene
His sale, Christie’s New York, 24 May 1994
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London

Andrew Gibbon-Williams & Ruth Artmonsky, William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, The Tortoise and the Hare, Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, London, 2003, ill.p.10

Leeds, University Gallery, William Roberts and Jacob Kramer: The Tortoise and the Hare, 30 April – 20 June 2003, toured to London, Ben Uri Art Gallery, 7 July – 7 September 2003, ill.p.10