The Tomb of Edward III, Westminster Abbey

Roberts's Tomb of Edward III in Westminster Abbey from around 1830 documents one of the most historically significant medieval monuments in Britain—the gilded bronze effigy of the fourteenth-century king who reigned for fifty years and transformed England into a major European military power. Westminster Abbey was the most important historical monument in Britain, combining centuries of royal commemoration with the most sophisticated medieval Gothic architecture in the kingdom, and Roberts's studies of its chapels and tombs brought this concentrated historical heritage before a wide public through exhibition and engraving. His ability to render the specific quality of light within medieval chapels—the filtered light through colored glass, the shadow and highlight of carved stone—gave his Abbey subjects a quality of historical atmosphere that pure topographical documentation could not achieve.

The Gothic tomb monument is rendered with precise sculptural and architectural detail within the atmospheric setting of the Abbey.