Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/621

R O B R O B 597 and by a victorious march towards Constantinople. But before Robert had reached the capital he was summoned back by Gregory VII., his suzerain, to rescue him from the emperor Henry IV., by whom he was being besieged in Rome. After capturing and sacking the city in May 108-t and conducting Gregory to a place of safety in Salerno, Guiscard resumed his operations against Alexius, defeating the united Greek and Venetian fleets, and raising the siege of Corfu in November 1084. While still engaged in active warfare he died of pestilence at Cephalonia on 17th July 1085. He was succeeded in the dukedom by his younger son Roger Bursa, whose son William died without issue in 1127. Guiscard's eldest son was Marc BOHEMOND (q. V.). ROBERTS, DAVID (1796-1864), landscape painter, was born at Stockbridge, Edinburgh, on 24th October 1796. At an early age he manifested a great love for art ; but his father, a shoemaker, wished him to follow the same trade. He was, however, apprenticed for seven years to a painter and house-decorator ; and during this time he employed his evenings in the earnest study of art. For the next few years his time was divided between work as a house-painter and as a scene-painter, and he even appeared occasionally on the boards as an actor in panto- mimes. In 1820 he formed the acquaintance of Clarkson Stanfield, then painting at the Pantheon, Edinburgh, by whose advice and example he greatly profited and at whose suggestion he began his career as an exhibitor, sending three pictures in 1822 to the "Exhibition of Works by Living Artists," held in Edinburgh. In the same year he removed to London, where he worked for the Coburg Theatre, and was afterwards employed, along with Stanfield, at Drury Lane. In 1824 he exhibited at the British Institution a view of Dryburgh Abbey, and sent two works to the first exhibition of the Society of British Artists, which he had joined, and of which he was elected president in 1831. In the same autumn he visited Normandy, and the works which were the results of this excursion began to lay the foundation of the artist's reputation, one of them, a view of Rouen Cathedral, being sold for eighty guineas. By his scenes for an opera entitled The Seraglio, executed two years later, he won much contemporary praise, and these, along with the scenery for a pantomime dealing with the naval victory of Navarino, and two panoramas executed jointly by him and Stanfield, were among his last work for the theatres. In 1829 he exhibited his imposing subject the Departure of the Israelites from Egypt, a commission from Lord Northwick, in which the style of the painter first becomes clearly apparent ; and three years afterwards he travelled in Spain, and passed over to Tangiers, return- ing in the end of 1833 with a supply of effective sketches, which were speedily elaborated into attractive and popular paintings. His Interior of Seville Cathedral was exhibited in the British Institution in 1834, and sold for 300 ; and he executed a fine series of Spanish illustrations for the Landscape Annual of 1836, a publication to which he con- tributed for four years; while in 1837 a selection of his Picturesque SketcJies in Spain was reproduced by litho- graphy, many of the subjects being carefully retouched on. the stone by the artist's own hand. In 1838 Roberts made a long tour in the East, sailing up the Nile, visiting Luxor and Karnak, and afterwards making his way to the Holy Land. He thus accumulated a vast collection of sketches of a class of scenery which had hitherto been hardly touched by British artists, and which appealed to the public with all the charm of novelty. The next ten years of his life were mainly spent in elaborat- ing these materials. Many Eastern subjects were painted, and an extensive series of drawings was lithographed by Louis Haghe in the superb work, Sketches in the Holy Land and Syria, 1842-49. In 1851, and again in 1853, Roberts visited Italy, painting the Ducal Palace, Venice, bought by Lord Londesborough, the interior of the Basi- lica of St Peter's, Rome, Christmas Day, 1853, and Rome from the Convent of St Onofrio, presented to the Royal Scottish Academy. His last volume of illustrations, Italy, Classical, Historical, and Picturesque, was published in 1859. He also executed, by command of the queen, a picture of the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a laborious and rather uncongenial task. In 1839 he was elected an associate, and in 1841 a full member of the Royal Academy; and in 1858 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Edinburgh. The last years of his life were occupied with a series of views of London from the Thames. He had executed six of these and was at work upon a picture of St Paul's Cathedral, when on 25th November 1864 he was seized with an attack of apoplexy and expired the same evening. The quality of Roberts's work is exceedingly equal and uniform during his whole career. The architecture, which is so prominent a feature in his paintings, is introduced with great picturesqueness and an easy command of its salient points, but with little care for the minutiaj of detail. His art was conventional, essentially scenic and spectacular in character, showing effective composition and an unerring instinct for broad general effect, but destitute of that close adherence to nature, that delicacy and truth of tone and colour, which are becoming increasingly characteristic of the productions of the English school. Something of the scene-painter appears in all his works, and his certainty and speed of execution were un- doubtedly founded upon his early practice for the stage. A Life of Roberts, compiled from his journals and other sources by James Ballantine, with etchings and pen-and-ink sketches by the artist, appeared in Edinburgh in I860. ROBERTSON, FREDERICK WILLIAM (1816-1853), one of the most brilliant and influential preachers of modern times, was born in London, on 3d February 1816. The first five years of his life were passed at Leith Fort, where his father, a captain in the Royal Artillery, was then resi- dent. The impressions made upon the child in those early years were never effaced ; the military spirit entered into his blood, and throughout life he was characterized by the qualities of the ideal soldier, courage, self-devotion, sense of duty, hatred of cruelty and meanness, chivalrous defence of the weak. In 1821 Captain Robertson retired to Beverley, where the boy was educated first at home, then at the grammar-school. At the age of fourteen he spent a year at Tours, from which he returned to Scotland and continued his education at the Edinburgh Academy and university. His father, who had remarked and fostered his singular nobility of character, his passion for purity and truthfulness, and his deepening religious feeling, now proposed that he should choose the church as his profes- sion, but received the decisive answer, "Anything but that ; I am not fit for it." At the age of eighteen he was accordingly articled to a solicitor in Bury St Edmunds, but the uncongenial and sedentary employment broke down his health in a year's time. It was then resolved to yield to his deep-rooted craving for a military career : his name was placed upon the list of the 3d Dragoons then serving in India, and for two years he devoted himself with ardour to the work of preparing for the army. But, by a singular conjuncture of circumstances and at the sacrifice of his own natural bent to his father's wish, he matriculated at Braze- nose College, Oxford, just two weeks before his commis- sion was put into his hands. Oxford he did not find wholly congenial to his intensely earnest spirit, but he read hard, and, as he afterwards said, " Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution." At the same time he made a careful study of the Bible, committing to memory the entire New Testament both in English and in Greek. The Tractarian movement had no attraction for him, although he admired some of its