Roberts met life-long friend Samuel Pring in Sydney where the latter worked as a clerk. Pring married Rebecca Mary Hills, a childhood friend of Roberts’ wife Lillie. Roberts put Pring’s name forward as Secretary of the Society of Artists in NSW in 1896. The two men remained in close contact when the Roberts’ family moved to London, and the Prings to the Isle of Wight, with Roberts regularly writing to his friend and occasionally visiting him.