William Roberts 1895-1980
Camargo Ballet Backcloth, 1931
pencil on paper
10 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches
signed

Provenance
Private Collection, Uk

Exhibited
London, d'Offay Couper Gallery, William Roberts RA: Drawings and Watercolours 1915 - 1968, 23 September - 10 October 1969, cat 20.

Literature
WIlliams, Andrew Gibbon, William Roberts: an English Cubist, Lund Humphries, Hampshire, 2004, fig 56, illus. p.80.



John Maynard Keynes was responsible for instigating the artist’s one and only excursion into the field of theatre design when, in 1931, he commissioned him to produce a drop curtain for another of his projects, the Camargo Ballet. Five years previously Roberts had missed out on a similar opportunity when Diaghilev paid him a call at the behest of Sachaverell Sitwell. At that time the great Russian impresario had been looking for a designer who might do justice to Lord Berner’s ballet., The Triumph of Neptune, but he had not been impressed by his former Vorticist colleagues Wyndham Lewis and Wadsworth. However, as the surviving design for Roberts’ Camargo Ballet commission suggests, Diaghilev misjudged Roberts. For the drop curtain he chose to depict as a relief from the live action the curtain was intended to provide, an action-packed rehearsal, stuffed with variety and incident. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate and entertaining concept. (Andrew Gibbon, William Roberts: An English Cubist, p. 80)