Alone in a Crowd: Richard Cork on a Reclusive Painter Who Lost Himself in London Life

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Few artists have been more reclusive than William Roberts. When I began researching my book on vorticism in the early 1970s, he was still vigorously producing monumental paintings at his house near Primrose Hill in north-west London. As one of the few eyewitnesses surviving from the crucial pre-1914 period, Roberts could have provided me with invaluable memories of his fellow vorticists. But he always refused to see me or even answer my letters, and I soon realised that he treated every one else with the same stubborn hostility. One journalist who was rash enough to ring Roberts's doorbell ended up kneeling on the front step, struggling in vain to conduct a conversation with the retiring artist through his letter box.

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Now, in a very funny memoir written for the catalogue of a major Roberts retrospective, the curator Anne Goodchild recalls her bizarre encounter with him on a number 74 bus. Fascinated to gain a sighting of the octogenarian recluse, she followed him to the top deck. Aided by "the chutzpah of youthful inexperience", she respectfully asked him if she were addressing Mr William Roberts. After what felt like an interminable pause, and with his gaze defiantly averted, he replied: "I …