The art of Charles Robinson, 1870–1937

cr1.jpg

‘Fair and False’, Songs and Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1915).

More illustrated gems from the collection of books at the Internet Archive. Charles Robinson, as mentioned earlier, was the older brother of illustrator William Heath (there was also a third illustrator brother in the family, Thomas). Charles was so prolific it’s difficult to choose one work over the many examples available in the Internet Archive, so here’s a brief selection from different books. If you only look at one of these, his oft-reprinted edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson is especially fine. There’s a distinct Art Nouveau flavour to much of Charles Robinson’s work and he also devoted more attention to page layout than his younger brother, many of his drawings being presented within sinuous frames and augmented by some very elegant lettering. If they haven’t been digitised already at Fontcraft’s Scriptorium, some of these type designs would make great fonts.

cr6.jpg

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1895).

cr4.jpg

Lullaby-land : Songs of Childhood by Eugene Field (1897).

cr2.jpg

Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

cr3.jpg

‘The Red Shoes’, Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (1899).

cr5.jpg

The Story of the Weathercock by Evelyn Sharp (1907).

cr7.jpg

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde (1913).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive