Roberts and Hay had been an apprentices collectively, and Hay had been seeing a mistress since his personal wife had started drinking. Roberts could have burned some letters from this period in disgrace at his wife's drinking drawback, but he was unusually frank in a letter to a pal, David Ramsay Hay. J. M. W. Turner persuaded Roberts to abandon scene painting and devote himself to turning into a full-time artist. Throughout https://purelight111.com/ of the 1820s, and along with English and Scottish scenes, Roberts painted views of prominent buildings in France and the Low Countries including Amiens, Caen, Dieppe, Rouen, Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent, sometimes making several paintings of the identical scene with only minor variations.

His paintings primarily based on this trip began to lay the foundation of his status; one in every of them, a view of Rouen Cathedral, offered for eighty guineas. In 1824, he exhibited another view of Dryburgh Abbey on the British Establishment and despatched two works to the first exhibition of the newly formed Society of British Artists. In 1831, the Society of British Artists elected him as their president. In London he made the acquaintance of artists corresponding to Edward Thomas Daniell and John Linnell, who frequented Daniel's home. Commissions from Covent Backyard included the units for the London premiere of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) in 1827, scenery for a pantomime depicting the naval victory of Navarino, and two panoramas that he executed jointly with Stanfield.

He sailed from Leith together with his spouse and their six-month-old Christine and settled in London. A miniature by Roberts from this time exhibits Margaret as a delicate woman with blonde ringlets, holding the smiling three-yr-previous Christine. In 1822 the Coburg Theatre, now the Outdated Vic in London, supplied Roberts a job as a scenic designer and stage painter. After working for some time at the Coburg Theatre, Roberts moved to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to create dioramas and panoramas with Stanfield. At Stanfield's suggestion, Roberts also despatched three footage to the 1822 Exhibition of Works by Living Artists, held in Edinburgh.