Antique Collecting articles William Heath Robinson - June 2015

Here’s to you Mr Robinson…
Work on a new museum to house the work of William Heath Robinson starts
this autumn. Art expert Richard Kay celebrates the mild-mannered artist
behind some of the UK’s quirkiest illustrations
Fig 1. WHR was
slightly built, with a
thick moustache and
wire-rimmed
spectacles, as this
self-penned picture
of himself (taken
from fig 12) shows

ONE MAY OCCASIONALLY HEAR a
picture described as Hogarthian if it shows a
certain type of wantonly dissolute decadence
but I am struggling to think of any other
British artist whose surname is instantly
synonymous with a particular genre of art.
Apart, that is, from William Heath
Robinson (hereinafter, WHR for brevity). To

Carrying Out the Correspondence Course for Mountain Climbing in the Home, signed, captioned, pen and ink
with watercolour, 17.75 x 13.75in. Published in “The Sportsman” (1928) and “The Humorist” (1931). A truly
beautiful construction with numerous delicate and improbable balances. Note that the ‘summit’ has already
been conquered and a reviving pot of tea awaits anyone who dares to sit down atop this teetering tower.
Grandma delivers pages of instructions from the safety of base camp. Sold for a near record price of
£20,300 in January 2010

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anyone over the age of perhaps 30, his
weirdly imaginative contraptions are instantly
and delightfully recognisable. In addition, it is
rare for an illustrator’s work to be so
meticulously composed and detailed that one
may return to it time and again, always finding
something new amid those pulleys, knotted
cords and implausibly suspended weights.
But we should consider ourselves
fortunate indeed to have WHR’s whimsy at all,
let alone in such quantity in so many engrossing books. His first ambition was to be a
landscape painter (such examples that remain
are flat and uninspired but its pursuit remained
a hobby for him); and then to be a book
illustrator, like his father and two of his
brothers (those that remain are not as
distinguished as WHR’s pedigree would
suggest). The wildly imaginative eccentricity of
his most characteristic works is as surprising a
find as a stonemason in a family of seamstresses. WHR was born in May 1872 at
Hornsey Rise in North London. His grandfather was an engraver, his father (Thomas)
was the principal illustrator on the Penny
Illustrated Paper, two of his brothers (Tom and
Charles) became competent illustrators and he
married an editor’s daughter, too. The family
was not affluent and young Will chose to
devise games by adapting and improvising his
toys. A psychologist could make much of that
but WHR’s schooldays in Islington left him with
few happy memories. He earned a place at the
revered Royal Academy Schools after a few
years at Islington School of Art and WHR
tolerated the high-minded academicism for just
two years before he left to pursue the family
business of illustration.
Odd contraptions
As early as 1902, aged barely 30, WHR had his
children’s story, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin,
published and the book contained early
evidence of WHR’s love of bizarre inventions.
Although any young published illustrator could
expect to set his sights on the popular appeal
of Punch, WHR pursued work through The
Bystander and The Tatler as the pay was
relatively good and the larger format permitted
clear reproduction of his detailed designs. In
fact, WHR’s work is very scarce in Punch: it
appeared just once in July 1923 (as a guest

Fig 2. Illustration to A Song of The English from Rudyard Kipling’s The Song of The Dead, 21 x
16.5in. Published as a frontispiece in 1909, this comes as something of a surprise alongside
WHR’s more frivolous subjects but it reflects his ambitions as a book illustrator early in his
career and reveals a mastery of the medium that can be overlooked in his more linear
drawings. Sold for £3,100, July 2009

artist) and a couple of times in 1936. WHR’s
family had instilled in him a great respect for
the merit of diligent hard work, executed with
effort and proper skill, and this strong theme
drove WHR throughout his life for he worked
on no fewer than 873 ‘inventions’ for his series
of seven How To... books between 1936 and
1943. His personality seems to have been at
odds with hard-nosed commercialism for he
was diffident, unpretentious and unassuming.
After a morning’s work, he would quietly ask
his wife, Josephine, ‘Do you think this sketch is
funny at all?’ Needless to say, invariably it would
be flawlessly clever. The novelist and critic Frank
Swinnerton described him as ‘a most sweettempered and attractive man’ and a hint of the
artist’s gentle eccentricity is apparent from his
agent A. E. Johnson’s observation that WHR
had a ‘curious attitude of mind, so vague and
elusive as to be difficult of definition in precise
terms’ while the artist himself vouchsafed that ‘I
really have a secret satisfaction in being

Fig 3. An Early Experiment by the Originator of the Gas-Bag at his Home
in Scotland, signed, captioned, pen and ink with grey wash, 15.25 x
9.75in. Published in “Flying” in March 1919, this shows WHR’s gentle
lampooning of the Scots for the perceived absurdity of their love of
kilts, bagpipes, tartan and whisky. Sold for £3,700, January 2010

considered rather mad.’
In middle age, WHR had the appearance
of a flustered bank clerk: he was slightly built,
with a thick moustache and wire-rimmed
spectacles, and carried the ubiquitous pipe
and the ink-spattered waistcoat of a hard
worker (see fig 1). Even his 1938
autobiography, My Line of Life, was damned
with faint praise as ‘a plain story’ that was
‘long on anecdote but short on insight’. In
the same way that Charlie Chaplin found his
métier in films rather than in books or
conversation, WHR’s preferred medium of
communica