The first time I became aware of the illustrations of William Heath Robinson
was when I stumbled across this paper back while scouring the shelves of a
bookshop. I was 16 years old and from that moment onward he has remained at the
top of my list of favourite illustrators and although there are plenty of others
on the list none has had a strong or as enduring an impact on me.
William Heath Robinson was born into a middle-class artistically inclined
family in north London in 1872 and he was obsessive about drawing from a very
early age. In 1887 he left school at the age of only 15 and following a spell
at Islington art school he managed to get a place at the prestigious Royal
Academy School in London but he found the unimaginative drawing assignments
tedious and he never completed the course. He originally planned a career as
a landscape artist but it soon became clear this would not be his path to
prosperity. Both his older brothers Charles and Thomas were by this time
doing quite well as illustrators of books and magazines.
So William abandoned his landscape ambitions, quickly put together a
portfolio of illustration and began lugging his work from publisher to
publisher. He was far from an overnight success but he did get enough work to
convince him to persevere and soon he was sharing a dilapidated studio in a
run-down part of London with fellow illustrator and friend Percy Billinghurst.
In 1897 through to 1899 both he and Billinghurst picked up commissions
from various publishers for badly printed cheap editions of books such as
the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Arabian Nights.
And with work coming in on a regular basis they were able to relocate to more
respectable premises in a better part of the capitol. William Heath Robinson was
one of the generation of illustrators who were no longer constrained by the
limitations of woodblock printing. The recent advances in print technology
meant they could now render drawings in pen and ink which could be transferred
direct to the printing press without undergoing the engraving process. And Heath
Robinson took full advantage of this freedom with a series of sophisticated
line illustrations for a collection of the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe published
in 1900. He created a series of aesthetically stunning and emotive
monochrome visual interpretations of Poe's verses using pen and ink with an
authority and descriptive sensitivity that most could only dream of and this
body of work represented a major step forward in his status and reputation as
an illustrator. All his monochromes from this period used a wide range of ink
hatching techniques to evoke all kinds of material and texture from clouds to
fabric and hair to foliage with remarkable dexterity. In 1902 Heath
Robinson's illustrated edition of The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel
Cervantes was published and crucially for this book he was able to work in
black and white and to demonstrate what he was capable of using watercolour.
Once full colour print technology had arrived more expensive editions of books
began to appear featuring full-page illustrations using the process and
Heath Robinsons talent for expressive and aesthetically pleasing watercolour
stood him in particularly good stead, competing confidently with others
such as Arthur Rackham and Edmond Dulac. In that same year Robinson's own
children's book The Adventures of Uncle Lubin was also published. Although the
book was only illustrated in black and white it featured a narrative and a set
of memorable fantasy images every bit was believably absurd and surreal as
those created for Alice in Wonderland by John Tenniel almost half a century
before.The book sold in reasonable numbers but it was far from the runaway
success it deserved to be. By 1903 Heath Robinson felts financially secure
enough to get married and in the same year he acquired an agent A.R. Johnson to
deal with clients and manage money - two things that he detested about the
freelance life - and although Johnson did get him a lot of high-profile work
apparently he wasn't much better than Heath Robinson at negotiating
comparably higher fees. Nevertheless it was to prove a lifelong and apparently
amicable relationship. In 1904 there were no less than five published volumes of
the work a french medieval writer Francois Rabelais illustrated by Heath
Robinson. It may have been an unlikely pairing of author and illustrator given
the frequently dark, violent and sexual nature of Rabelais stories but the
monochromes created were some of Heath Robinson's most compelling and
skillfully rendered images. This large and impressive collection
showed an illustrator totally in control of his medium and he used his prowess
with ink to evoke the art of the woodblock prints of the great
Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Durer.
Following on from his success with Don Quixote quite a few more commissions for
books with colour pages for both children and adults came his way in the next few
years. There was an edition of Shakespeare's fantasy tale Twelfth Night
which was published in 1908 and only a year later there was the dramatic
visualization of Rudyard Kipling's A Song of the English and both these works
provided further proof of his abilities in both colour and monochrome.Ten years
after the publication of Uncle Lubin Heath Robinson's second children's storybook
Bill the Minder was published in 1912 and this time the book featured some
full-page watercolours. Once again he created a wildly nonsensical story and a
series of breathtakingly assured images throughout. This book proved to be
considerably more popular than his first outing and it's considered rightly by
many to be a pinnacle in Heath Robinson's work. Throughout the second
decade of the 20th century there were several more lavishly Illustrated and
expensively printed stories and collections which followed. These
included an opportunity to revisit Andersen's fairy tales in 1913 and in a
remarkable flurry of activity he followed this up with Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream in 1914 and Charles Kingsley's the Water Babies in
1915. Despite the volume of images created in a very short time there was
no visible loss of quality in any of the work. When the Great War
broke out in 1914 William Heath Robinson was already 42 and too old to fight so
he set about drawing large numbers of wartime cartoons
most of them appearing in the popular magazines the Sketch and the Bystander.
But these comical images made no mention of the misery or brutality of war.
Instead they were a development of what had begun tentatively with Uncle Lubin
in 1902 - the triumph of hopeless improvised impossible machinery and an
oddly plausible perversion of the laws of nature depicting preposterous weapons
and military devices being used by the combatants. And as well as appearing in
the magazines they were also published as book collections. By the time the war
had ended William Heath Robinson had become a household name in Britain
almost entirely due to this body of cartoons rather than what he referred to
as his serious work. And it's from these drawings that the term Heath Robinson
device meaning any improvised or unlikely contraption derives. If you're
American you'll probably recognize this better as a Rube Goldberg machine, named
for the cartoonist who created similar images around the same time. Demand for
this aspect of Heath Robinson's work became even greater and his absurd
inventions and improbable gravity defying scenarios featured in virtually
every publication of the 20s and 30s and made good-natured fun of many aspects of
everyday 20th century British life. And this in turn led to a lot of advertising
work coming his way. By this point it was well understood that
humour was an invaluable tool in advertising and there were many press
and poster campaigns which relied on the comic visual appeal of his mad
inventions to attract and more importantly hold the attention of
potential customers. William Heath Robinson and his family
had been living in the London suburb of Pinner up to this point but once the war
was over they moved to the village of Cranleigh and in addition to the vast
amount of commercial illustration he was creating he also found time to paint
watercolours of the surrounding countryside. His illustrated edition of
Perrault's Old Time Stories was published in 1921 and this was a clear indication
that he was still a master of fantasy even if most of his income was now
coming from his humorous work in magazines or advertising campaigns.
Published in 1922 Peter Quip in Search of a Friend was the last of the three
children's books Heath Robinson would author. This book was another agreeable
fantasy quest story and although the coloured pages were far
more graphic and flat than those of Bill the Minder this was merely a
reflection of how style in children's publishing was evolving with fussier
forms of traditional application of colour becoming less fashionable. This was also
reflected in Heath Robinson's humorous pull of work of the period. In 1929 the
family moved again and settled for good in Highgate North London and by now it
was an apparently never-ending stream of humorous drawings for magazines
advertisements and books which was keeping him busy. Traditional fairy tale
book work had all but disappeared but in 1933 Heath Robinson's illustrations for
the first in the series of professor Branestawm books written by Norman
Hunter increased the book's appeal and it's sales.
when the Second World War began in 1939 Heath Robinson returned to his wartime
absurdities but he would not live long enough to see the eventual victory of
Britain and the Allies. The last project he worked on was a set of black-and-white
illustrations for Lillian Clopek's short story collection Once Upon a Time, which
was published in 1944. And that was the year William Heath Robinson died at the
age of 72. In modern Britain William Heath Robertson hasn't yet reached unsung
hero status but he is far from a household name and any reference to
Heath Robinson machines will probably die out with my generation so I hope
this tribute will help to keep his flame lit with at least a couple of new
converts out there and maybe this has gone some way to repaying the enormous
debt of gratitude I and countless other illustrators owe to the genius of
William Heath Robinson