I wasn’t planning on featuring William Heath Robinson again so soon but I couldn’t resist posting some extracts from his 1914 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, another great download from the scanned books at the Internet Archive. I have a few of these illustrations in a WHR monograph but I didn’t realise the book as a whole was so good. The Robinson brothers had a remarkable mastery of space in their work, no doubt derived from Beardsley but they found a way to make his expanses of black and white work for their own distinctive styles. This book, like many of those of the period, features colour plates but I much prefer Heath Robinson’s black-and-white work to his watercolours. His Poe book contains many fine drawings but his style is more suited to this Shakespeare play, especially in the depictions of clouds of fairy figures tumbling through the air.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe