and were perfectly in tune with the fashionable Art Deco style. 1930s In the 1930s the angular style of Roberts's earlier work was replaced by a rounder, more sculptural approach. This change in style is, for example, apparent in the double portrait of John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Keynes became an important patron of Roberts through the London Artists' Association, and the paintings that Keynes purchased are now in the collection of King's College, Cambridge. While Roberts was critical of the financial support that he received from the London Artists' Association, it is difficult to imagine how the family would have survived without this patronage. Later he would describe the thirties as "the years of economic struggle". A number of striking large-scale canvases were undertaken in the early thirties, such as The Masks (1934) and The Playground (The Gutter) (1934–5), both works being exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and in New York. Despite their financial position the family occasionally took holidays: they travelled to Spain for the first time in the early 1930s and went on a cycling holiday to Brighton that apparently inspired Les Routiers. Andrew Heard suggests that Roberts may have used a French title for this work as a nod towards the work of Fernand Léger, whose "tubist" forms have some similarity to Roberts's figures. 1940s Soon after the Second World War broke out, in September 1939 William and Sarah left London for Oxford. Roberts was too old for combat service, but enquired about the possibility of getting 'some pictorial propaganda work to do'. He was frustrated at being offered only minor assignments for the War Artists' Advisory Committee. However, he did complete two commissions documenting life on the home front – Munitions Factory (1940) and The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters(1942) – both now in Salford Art Gallery. William and Sarah eventually spent most of the war years in a flat in Marston on the outskirts of Oxford. Roberts managed to get a one-day-a-week teaching job at Oxford Technical College. Throughout his life he drew inspiration from his surroundings, and a number of watercolour drawings from this period show rural scenes on the River Cherwell and a nearby Gypsy camp. In 1946 he and Sarah returned to London and took a room at 14 St Mark's Crescent, a house in multiple occupancy backing on to the Regent's Canal,