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