Exhibitions

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…

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…

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…

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See Heath Robinson’s unpublished watercolours, many never exhibited before.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…

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,…

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…

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.