His subjects were human nature and particularly those individuals who had an inflated view of their own importance. (Geoffrey Beare, curator and author of the exhibition book)

By the late 1890s Heath Robinson had established his reputation as a cartoonist for magazines like Tatler and Punch and as an illustrator of luxury editions of Shakespeare. The 1890s and the Edwardian decade were the heyday of English book illustrations and Heath Robinson even wrote and illustrated some books of his own (for example, The adventures of Uncle Lubin, 1902).

Unsurprisingly, the Great War changed all that. For a while there was a greater appetite for humorous stories and cartoons to keep up the spirits of people both at the Front and back home, and HR provided a steady stream of morale-boosting cartoons, many now collected in Heath Robinson’s Great War.

But in 1915 his career took a new turn. He was approached by Johnny Walker’s distillery and asked to produce cartoons showing how their trademark Scotch whiskey was manufactured. HR visited the factory in Scotland, not to produce a documentary record, but to spot ideas for his fantastical contraptions. The result was a set of cartoons showing the manufacture of the holy elixir using a series of ever more complex and ramshackle devices.

In the filtering vats at Kilmarnock by William Heath Robinson (1927) © The William Heath Robinson Trust

After the Great War the market for the kind of luxury books Heath Robinson had illustrated dried up. Cartoon work continued in a new generation of magazines, and he continued to ply his trade there. But it was in the post-war 1920s that the modern advertising trade really took off, and HR was poised to take advantage of it.

This fabulous exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner (just five minutes from Pinner tube station on the Metropolitan line) brings together a choice selection of Heath Robinson’s extensive work in advertising illustration.

It’s estimated that between the 1915 Johnny Walker commission and his death in 1944, Heath Robinson worked for over 100 companies, making drawings and cartoons to promote goods as varied as asbestos roofs, bread, carbon paper, tarmac, antiseptics, bespoke tailoring and leather car seats.

In fact, just the list of products he promoted gives a kind of surreal insight into the realities of 1920s and 1930s social life.

The exhibition displays over 60 original artworks on the walls, as well as 20 or so examples of printed material from contemporary magazines. The Heath Robinson consists of one room given over to the permanent collection and one room given over to changing exhibitions. One room doesn’t sound much but it is a room jam-packed with gadgets, jokes and gags.

It is rare to hear laughter in an ‘art’ gallery, but when I visited, the room was full of people pointing out and laughing at the confabulated contraptions and heroic absurdities of his pictures.

Heath Robinson’s Golf Course, design for a biscuit tin for Peek Frean (c.1925) © William Heath Robinson Trust

The exhibition focuses on sets of work produced for particular clients, showing how he elaborated ideas around a central theme. As far as I could see, he took three strategies or approaches to the commissions:

• a comic account of the production process itself, requiring as much tottering and patched up preposterous machinery as possible (as with Johnny Walker)
• a humorous look at the product though history
• the with/without approach i.e. showing the benefits of buying/using/eating product X

A good example of the historical approach is a set of cartoons showing the benefits which would have been brought to various historical figures if only they had had the opportunity to purchase luxury leather goods from Connolly Brothers of Wandsworth. Figures like Mr and Mrs Noah, Alfred the Great, and William the Conqueror are shown benefiting from Connolly Brothers luxury leather products.

William the Conqueror appreciates the comforts of leather by William Heath Robinson © The William Heath Robinson Trust

Heath Robinson developed a close working relationship with Connolly Brothers, who manufactured a wide array of leather goods including car seats, car hoods, furniture, bags, cases and so on. His first work for them was a 12-page booklet which they used to promote their products at that year’s Motor show and was so successful that they didn’t quite commission a new one annually, but by the end of his career he’d produced a total of 12 books and some 200 cartoons for them, and there are extensive selections here from three volumes, Light on Leather (1922), Leather breeding on the Wandle (1927) and The Connolly Chronicles (1933).

In the same vein are cartoons promoting macaroni, sugar, paper, a herd of thoroughbred pigs, pianos and the Great West Railway.

I particularly liked the set made for the toffee manufacturer John Mackintosh in 1921, which Heath Robinson titled ‘A half hour in Toffee Town’ – especially the illustration in the centre-right, of how they get the chocolate to completely cover each individual toffee, which involves a watering can, a pulley and an umbrella.

A half hour in Toffee Town by William Heath Robinson © The William Heath Robinson Trust

In a set like this each individual incident is, apparently, called a vignette. Individual vignettes could be extracted from the larger context and recycled. Thus single vignettes Heath Robinson drew for the manufacturers of Izal, an antiseptic product, were issued as postcards, and even printed on toilet paper. Another client used Heath Robinson illustrations on blotting paper.

These are all examples of the proliferation of the image across all kinds of products and new media in the 1920s. Heath Robinson was one of the graphic artists who rewrote the rules on how we communicate commercially: replacing heavy, Victorian, copy-dominated ads with a focus on imagery which tells stories.

Take one of his most famous works, the Hovis ads, a classic example of the ‘with/without’ approach mentioned above, and of the new image-focused approach.

‘Hovis, the bread of health’ by William Heath Robinson (1927) © The William Heath Robinson Trust

As well as lots of hilarious pictures, and fascinating social history about the products he was promoting, the exhibition also allows you to trace the development of Heath Robinson’s style.

Although his work was always too varied to defy sweeping generalisation, by and large what you see is a progression from a turn-of-the-century, Arthur Rackham-esque interest in the grotesque, the crabbed and the eccentric, often set inside cramped or spooky interiors – to a much sparser, cleaner, and possibly Art Deco-influenced line in the 1930s.

Thus the elaborate stone setting of the vaults in the Johnny Walker picture from 1915 (at the top of this review) could, at a stretch, be home to a troll or goblin. Although this reproduction is in black and white, the original was coloured in watercolour, adding to the sense of depth and density.

Compare and contrast with the clarity of line and the lack of shading in a picture like this, drawn some 20 years later to promote pianos manufactured by Firth Brothers. Even when the later pictures portray complex contraptions, the ones from the 1930s do so in a style which is somehow cleaner and crisper.

Some interesting pianos not made by Firth Brothers by William Heath Robinson © The William Heath Robinson Trust

Summary

So do your funny bones a favour: get along to the Heath Robinson Museum and spend a happy hour chortling at the works of this great promoter of happiness, as well as picking up titbits of English social history, and enjoying the evolution and changing style of a great English humourist.

Related links

• Heath Robinson’s World of Advertising continues at the Heath Robinson Museum until 18 February
• The Heath Robinson Museum website

More Heath Robinson Museum reviews

• More Heath Robinson Museum reviews