One of the greatest Welsh painters of the 20th century, Will Roberts has left a remarkable body of work depicting scenes reflecting domestic, pastoral and industrial life in the Principality. He was born in Ruabon, Denbighshire, in 1907, the son of a railwayman. The family moved to Neath in 1918 and Roberts never moved away apart from war service. Early aptitude took him to Swansea School of Art in 1928, on a scholarship to attend as a part-time student. From that time he continued to paint and draw uninterruptedly until a few weeks before his death.

As a young man Roberts wrote that he was constrained by excessive shyness; this led him to take a position in a jeweller's shop, where he hoped he would be secluded and out of the public eye. (He was invited back to the business after the Second World War as a partner, a post he reluctantly accepted, but only on a part-time basis so that he could devote time to painting.) The activities that took him out of himself in those early years were his love of walking and sketching as he travelled, and a passion for playing the violin.

His interests in painting and the violin found ready outlets when he joined the RAF in 1940. He was a technician working on aircraft maintenance and at each posting he completed drawings and watercolours depicting camp life. At Biggin Hill, for example, he evokes aspects of life in the billet - scenes round a stove or of men resting on bunks, or a rapid charcoal study, Running Up, of a group of men huddled over the tail of a Spitfire, anchoring it down while the engine is tested. What is evident in these wartime studies are the early hallmarks of what Vernon Watkins described asRoberts's gift of being able "to give dignity to the casual scene and make it memorable".

Roberts's first picture to hang in any significant setting was in a forces exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in 1944. By this time he was beginning to experiment with the use of thick gouache and had been excited by the effects he could achieve; he had been deeply impressed by some Expressionist works he had seen in Leicester.

Towards the end of 1945 he heard of an exotic Polish painter and refugee who had settled in Ystradgynlais, Josef Herman. Herman was a little younger than Roberts (and predeceased him by three weeks) but at the time both men were aspiring young artists and they recognised in each other a shared seriousness of purpose.

Roberts was always grateful to Herman for the impetus he gave him to paint in oil and to develop his Expressionist style. Roberts and Herman were associates for several years until Herman moved to London. When they worked together they worked as equals. They had quite separate approaches to their subject: Herman had a political dimension and message inherent in his work and many of his figures are archetypes of the worker or the peasant; Roberts was not interested in making his paintings vehicles for any type of political message. In his pictures the figures are both individual and central to the overall structure. The expressive power of his work lies in his capacity to isolate and capture a fleeting experience.

The creative association between Roberts and Herman was important to both in their development but to Roberts this comradeship was completely subordinate to the transforming effect on his life of a renewed friendship with Phyllis Hinds. She was an intelligent, articulate, beautiful and vivacious woman and they married in 1947. She provided him with unwavering support and encouragement for the rest of his life. He in turn has left a permanent memorial to their lives and that of their daughter, Sian, in a wonderful series of paintings and drawings spanning over 50 years, many of them being examples of his finest work.

Roberts's work began to reach a wider audience in the early Fifties. He was invited to exhibit paintings in a Welsh Arts Council Exhibition in 1953 on the theme "British Romantic Painting in the 20th Century". In the following year he was featured in an important mixed exhibition, "Expressionist, Fauve and Cubist Painting", at Roland, Browse & Delbanco in Cork Street, London, where he hung alongside Chagall, Matisse, De Smet and other major figures.

He exhibited with the London Group for some 10 years and was also an exhibiting member of the Artists International Association. He joined the 56 Group on its foundation in Wales but left a few years later as he felt uncomfortable with the judgemental aspect of artists' groups. By the early Sixties he had turned his attention back to exhibiting predominantly in Wales.

In 1962 Sir Kenneth Clark awarded Roberts's painting Farm at Cimla the Byng-Stamper Prize for landscape painting. This fine work now hangs in the National Museum of Wales, thanks to the Contemporary Arts Society for Wales.

Fashions in the art world changed and Expressionist style, not especially popular in Britain at this period, became sidelined in the Sixties and after, only to be re-appraised in more recent times. Roberts was at the height of his powers during those long years and less determined artists might have become dispirited or changed their style. If Roberts was disappointed, he did not let it show and he persevered, exploring his own vision in his own way.

In the Sixties he undertook a series of large charcoal drawings of men at work in steel and tin-plate mills in Neath. Although the coal industry was close at hand, he was never attracted to the coalmines as subjects for painting; he felt that Herman had taken on the mines and, as he said recently, "Herman closed the book on the subject."

What attracted Roberts were industrial remains in the landscape, "the thumb-prints of the 19th century" as he aptly described them. The opportunities to paint were all around him and he took those opportunities, the viaducts, solitary chimneys and old railway lines. His aim was not to paint them as an historic record before they completely disappeared but to try and convey how these remains were integrated into the landscape.

Roberts continued to hold regular exhibitions over the years and was hung at the Royal Academy summer show for many years. His reputation gradually extended: in 1966 the first of three television programmes was shown devoted to his work with a second in the Eighties and a third in the Nineties.

By the beginning of the Nineties a perception had developed that a remarkable artist had been at work in Wales but that proper recognition had not been given to him. In 1992 University College Swansea awarded him an Honorary Fellowship. In 1993 Susan Daniel at the Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno organised an excellent, though somewhat circumscribed, retrospective, 1927-92. This exhibition toured some of the leading public galleries in Wales, finishing appropriately as the centrepiece to the Arts Exhibition at the Royal National Eisteddfod of 1994 held in the Vale of Neath. It is a matter of surprise and regret that the National Museum of Wales never mounted a full retrospective of Roberts's work.

Will Roberts was a churchman and a man of religious convictions. Hanging in St David's Church, Neath, is a large and impressive set of the Stations of the Cross drawn in charcoal by Roberts in the 1970s.

He was a handsome, striking man, slim and of middle height. He was very well-informed, of a warm and generous disposition and with a very extensive circle of friends. He and his wife held almost permanent open house. He loved Wales and Neath and took an active interest in the preservation and conservation matters in the town. As a painter he never retired. He died Neath, West Glamorgan on 11th March 2000 leaving a wife and daughter.

Brian Carter

Obituary, The Independent 14th March 2000

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