Printing skills and a career in illustration
Robinson was born in Islington, the son of illustrator and wood engraver Thomas Robinson. His brothers Thomas Heath and William Heath Robinson also became artists. He trained with the lithographic printers Waterlow and Sons and attended art classes, but could not sustain full-time study at the Royal Academy schools.
A commission to illustrate Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses helped establish his reputation in the 1890s. Book and magazine work followed, increasingly in colour. The First World War reduced the market for lavish illustrated books and brought financial strain. In later years he concentrated more on watercolour and magazine commissions, becoming a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1932.
Wilde’s stories in an ornamental world
Robinson’s illustrated edition of The Happy Prince appeared in 1913. The Brentano’s copy held here records a 1920 reprint. Its colour plates and decorative settings belong to this later presentation of Wilde’s stories, rather than to their first publication.
The pictures arrange figures within elaborate interiors and gardens, using pale open areas and dense surrounding detail to direct attention. In the title tale, a prince’s beautiful surface stands above a city marked by poverty, while a swallow carries help between its inhabitants. Robinson’s sumptuous design sits beside a story that questions luxury and indifference. The relationship between visual abundance and material deprivation gives the illustrated volume a particular tension.
