Permanent Exhibition
Our permanent Heath Robinson exhibition combines original artwork with books, photographs, film & digital media to tell the full story of Heath Robinson’s artistic career.
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 exhibition has been designed around 19 of the original watercolour drawings from her Peter Pan and includes 7 watercolours from Alice.
Edith Farmiloe was the wife of a vicar who had parishes first in Soho and then in Hackney and between 1895 and 1909 she wrote and illustrated stories based on the lives of the children from the mostly very poor families who lived in her husband’s parishes. Self-taught, she had a natural affinity with the children’s world. Rather than satirizing them as other contemporary artists did, she shared their joys and humours, jealousies and kindnesses, and all the other quick emotions that make up the drama of childhood.
The exhibition of work by these two independent-minded women artists will coincide with the centenary of the Representation of the People Act of 1918.
