Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Bernard Meninsky. The Slade's emphasis on the importance of drawing and sound structuring of composition would inform Roberts's later work. In 1912 he won the Slade's Melville Nettleship prize for Figure Composition. An English Cubist Roberts was intrigued by Post-Impressionism and Cubism, an interest fuelled by his friendships at the Slade (in particular with Bomberg) as well as by his travels in France and Italy after leaving the Slade in 1913. Later in 1913 he joined Roger Fry's Omega Workshops for three mornings a week. The ten shillings a time that Omega paid enabled him to create challenging Cubist-style paintings such as The Return of Ulysses (now owned by the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham). After leaving Omega he was taken up by Wyndham Lewis, who was forming a British alternative to Futurism. Ezra Pound had suggested the name Vorticism, and Roberts's work was featured in both editions of the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST. Roberts was a signatory to the Vorticist Manifesto that appeared in the first edition of the magazine. Roberts himself preferred the description "Cubist" for his work of this period. Two large-scale oil paintings exhibited in the 1917 Penguin Club Vorticist exhibition in New York, and purchased by John Quinn, were subsequently lost, but the radical nature of Roberts's "Cubist style" is evidenced by The Toe Dancer (owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the recently rediscovered Boxers – both exhibited with the London Group in 1915. First World War In 1916 Roberts enlisted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery as a gunner, serving on the Western Front in the Ypres sector, north of the Menin Road and at Arras. Having been on active service for the best part of two years, he successfully applied to the Canadian War Records Office for a commission to paint a large-scale war subject. In April 1918 he returned to London as an official war artist, with the proviso that the work should not be in the Cubist style. The outcome of the commission was The First German Gas Attack at Ypres, a powerful expressionist work that is on permanent display in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Roberts was subsequently commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, for whom he painted A Shell Dump, France (1918–19), now in the Imperial War Museum collection along with twelve watercolour drawings