Exhibitions

An exhibition of the illustrations of Edward Ardizzone, including many never exhibited before. Edward Ardizzone RA (1900-79) was one of relatively few British artists who defined the field of illustration for their generation. Although his work as an artist and illustrator was wide-ranging, it is for his children’s books that he is best known. This…

Come and celebrate Summer at the Heath Robinson Museum with our vibrant, colourful and fun new exhibition for all the family. From hats made from tin cans, bags made from ring-pulls and a cheese platter made from a flattened bottle, to woven rolled newspaper baskets and boxes, scoops made from food cans and ear-rings from…

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…