New Special Exhibition features illustrations from the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s classic novel “The Water-Babies”. For our Autumn 2017 Special Exhibition, we focus on illustrations created for the classic Victorian novel “The Water-Babies”.  Written by the Reverend Charles Kingsley for his son, this extraordinary fable – sub-titled “A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby” – first...

See Heath Robinson's drawings for well-known and not-so-well-known brands. With his trademark depiction of convoluted but highly ‘outcome-focused’ contraptions, William Heath Robinson – renowned artist, illustrator and humourist – was also a consummate ‘ad man’. In the early 20th century, he was one of the pioneering artists who rewrote the rules on how we communicate...

Neo-Romanticism was an art movement that drew inspiration partly from the landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the illustrations of William Blake, but also from more recent art movements such as cubism. It focused on the emotional content of the work, prioritising content over form. Our exhibition is about the Neo-Romantic Period in illustration, which came...

A Crafts Council Touring Exhibition A Curious Turn is an exhibition of automata. Automata are sculptures which are brought magically to life through a sequence of cogs, cams, cranks and levers. For centuries they have delighted and bewitched people. A Curious Turn features automata from the leading makers of the last 40 years, ranging from...

The exhibition will feature two very talented Edwardian female illustrators whose work has been largely forgotten. Alice Bolingbroke Woodward was the first illustrator of the story of Peter Pan. She illustrated many books for Blackie & Sons and for George Bell between 1895 and the 1930s including a new edition of Alice in Wonderland. The...

A selection of WWI illustrations by Heath Robinson along with war-time correspondence will be shown as a small additional exhibition in the Activity Studio.

The following clip shows an interview with Geoffrey Beare on Uxbridge FM (the interview starts approximately 5 minutes 25 seconds in): From about 1930 onwards Heath Robinson’s humour was centred on domestic life. In 1934 his house “The Gadgets” was constructed at the Ideal Home Exhibition, and in 1936 How to Live in a Flat, the...

What inspired The Beardsley Generation? The exhibition will explore the impact that new photographic means of reproduction (process engraving) at the end of the 19th Century had on illustration. Older artists who had relied on the craft wood-engraver to work up their sketches for publication were swept aside and a new generation of artists, well...

One of the most popular exhibits in ‘A Curious Turn’, our recent automata show, was ‘Mule Make Mule’ by Tim Lewis. This new exhibition will feature a number of Tim’s larger automata and kinetic sculptures selected by the artist and displayed in settings designed by him. Lewis's sculptures include a variety of machines that react...

See Heath Robinson’s unpublished watercolours, many never exhibited before. Heath Robinson trained as an artist at the Royal Academy Schools and always saw himself as an artist. He earned his living as an illustrator and cartoonist, but he would spend much of the limited spare time he had either drawing or painting in watercolours. He...

See Heath Robinson’s most popular work along with that of other artists, all themed on fairies and elves. The most popular work in the Museum’s collection is a painting called ‘The Fairy’s Birthday’ and the finest examples of Heath Robinson’s illustrative work are the drawings that he made in 1914 to illustrate ‘A Midsummer Night’s...

Charles Keeping, one of the most influential of modern British book illustrators, died in 1988. Our exhibition celebrates his life and work. Keeping was a Londoner through and through, and his childhood in Lambeth provided him with an endlessly rich stock of images to draw on throughout his working life. But his vision was universal,...

During the early twentieth century, John Hassall was one of Britain's best-known and most high-profile artists. Working across a variety of disciplines, he was a prolific book illustrator, a humorous artist for postcards and magazines, an art school founder and teacher, a painter in oils, consummate clubman, and a designer of toys, figurines, pottery and...

Korky Paul has enjoyed outstanding international success as an award-winning illustrator of children’s books, producing many instantly recognisable and popular characters, such as Winnie the Witch, The Fish Who Could Wish, Professor Puffendorf and Sir Scallywag. The Winnie and Wilbur series of picture books written by Valerie Thomas and the fiction or chapter books written...

The exhibition will show artwork from the children’s stories that Heath Robinson both wrote and illustrated. See the first signs of his inventive talents and meet a cast of strange and mysterious characters. In 1902 Heath Robinson was commissioned by Grant Richards to write and illustrate a new children’s book and he took the episodic...

The 31st May 2022 will be the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Heath Robinson. He was trained as an artist at the Royal Academy Schools, and as past exhibitions at the Museum have shown, he was a great illustrator and a highly accomplished painter in watercolours, but it is as a humorous artist...

‘Scene through Wood’ offers a visual feast of the finest wood engravings of the past 100 years, and celebrates the extraordinary artists, past and present, who made them. Curated by engraver and artist Anne Desmet RA RE, this exhibition from the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum — home to one of the most extensive collections...

Throughout his career Shakespeare’s plays, and especially the songs within them, provided a source of inspiration for some of Heath Robinson’s most popular and successful illustrations.

Pictures from an exceptional private collection

Heath Robinson's illustrations for the Fairy Tale works of Hans Andersen and Charles Perrault, with works on the same subjects by children’s book illustrator Michael Foreman

Acidic, bawdy, grotesque. Heath Robinson's illustrations for Rabelais explore a dark and dramatic part of his practice, characterised by expressive linework and grim subjects. See them alongside Goya's Los Caprichos; experimental etchings portraying beasts, scoundrels and a society in ruin.

Alongside a sensational artistic career, Mary V. Wheelhouse was also a fierce suffragette. See her art and activism come together in this retrospective exhibition.

The cartoonist turns his hand to magazine illustration! Explore Heath Robinson's art for literary magazine covers, articles, and stories in this exhibition of a lesser known part of his work, produced throughout the 1920s and 30s.

The exhibition highlights the interplay between writer and illustrator. Michael Rosen’s children’s writing has delighted generations – and now a landmark exhibition journeys through his life and career via a selection of original illustrations from his books.