Heath Robinson Contraptions

Product Information

In March 2015, the Trust secured the paintings and drawings after being awarded grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the Art Fund, ensuring the works would stay together in the UK - and now in their new home in Pinner, London. At magazines such as The Sketch, he developed his humorous illustrations for adults, culminating in the series of inventions for which he became known by his contemporaries as 'The Gadget King'. The phrase 'Heath Robinson', used to describe eccentric machinery, had entered the language by the First World War (the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is of 1917).

He went on to illustrate Shakespeare, Kipling, and more of his own books, in colour and black and white. So I purposefully looked into creating a design where the contraption is much more backwards and you require people to row this boat.

However, it is the drawings of outlandish contraptions that he produced regularly for The Tatler and The Sketch, that seem to have paid the bills – and explain why people might take the trip out of central London along the Metropolitan Line to Pinner today. Evidently a carefully composed shot, it features a range of his work in the background -- illustration, watercolours, magazine covers. Architect and Bartlett Professor of Architecture and Urbanism CJ Lim, told WIRED that Robinson's work and commentary doesn't feel dated.

Robinson served as a consultant at the Percy Bradshaw's The Press Art School, a school teaching painting, drawing, and illustration by correspondence. The British are still a nation of garage-haunting amateur engineers who will recognise the inhabitants of Heath Robinson’s world, with their pot bellies and pots of tea, archaic faces and sturdily commonsensical approach to the problems of existence. Trustee Beare is author of several books about William Heath Robinson and Chairman of the wonderfully named Imaginative Book Illustration Society.The creators of the 'Wallace and Gromit' films have acknowledged that many of Wallace's inventions owe a great debt to those of Heath Robinson. Lim is interested in how Robinson required a person to be part of the mechanism to work, focusing on human behaviour as much as the rise of the machine.

It was in Pinner that the finest of his book illustrations were made, as well as much of the work that established him as a humorist. He told WIRED: "The Heath Robinson Museum Project will fill a significant gap in the arts provision in this country.

The Wallace-Gromit household borrows heavily from a full-scale model of a contraption-filled house entitled "The Gadget Family", designed and built for the Ideal Home Show in 1934 -- there are even trapdoors delivering the family to the breakfast table. His father Thomas, an illustrator and engraver, had to illustrate the main news story each week for the Penny Illustrated Paper.