Robinson, Charles (1870–1937), British illustrator, son of Thomas Robinson who was an artist and engraver; along with his two brothers William Heath Robinson and Thomas Heath Robinson, he worked in the Arts and Crafts tradition. In 1899 he and his brothers illustrated Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen for Dent. Before that he had already illustrated Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and Aesop's Fables. In the same year, he also drew illustrations for Charles Perrault's Tales of Past Times, and in 1900–2 Dent published a three‐volume set,
In 1908 he illustrated Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco's The Fairies' Fountain, and Other Stories and another two‐volume True Annals of Fairyland in the Reign of King Cole for Dent in 1909. Two particular fairy‐tale books appeared in 1910 and 1913: the first, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms' Grimms' Fairy Tales, and the second, Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, and Other Tales.
Largely self‐taught, he was apprenticed as a lithographic artist and was dedicated to the ideal of the book beautiful, an ideal which encompassed the text, layout, illustrations, and cover. He worked primarily in black and white and watercolour, and was one of the first to integrate the text with illustration. According to Tessa Chester and Irene Whalley, his work was characteristic of the Art Nouveau period with its ‘interweaving, curving line, the solid black areas relieved by white, and the careful use of stylised pattern’.
His works were exhibited at the Royal Academy and he was a lifelong member of the London Sketch Club. Altogether, he illustrated over 100 books, one of the last of which was Granny's Book of Fairy Stories (1930).
Bibliography
- Whalley, Joyce and Chester, Tessa Rose, A History of Children's Book Illustration (1988).
— Louisa Smith
