art.wikisort.org - Artist

Frederick Cayley Robinson ARA (18 August 1862 – 4 January 1927) was an English artist, creating paintings and applied art including book illustrations and theatre set designs. Along with a number of other British artists, Cayley Robinson continued to paint striking Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian subjects well into the twentieth century despite this approach becoming deeply unfashionable. His work has been examined in a PhD thesis by Alice Eden and an exhibition Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum.

His series of large-scale mural paintings for the Middlesex Hospital entitled Acts of Mercy commissioned around 1915 and completed in 1920 are some of his most impressive works, along with Pastoral, 1923, (Tate, London), which was bought by the Chantrey Bequest for the nation. However his many smaller paintings, particularly of interiors featuring sombre women as well as the theme of departure, are significant works of modern British art.

The artist's time studying at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1891-1894 had a critical influence on his entire artistic output which displays the influence of European Symbolism, especially the avant-garde group the Nabis and the cult revival of interest in Edward Burne-Jones in Paris at this time. Like many of his peers, Cayley Robinson felt drawn to a new style of art, moving away from modern impressionism and appearing to emulate the visionary medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Various connections - within the circle of Ricketts and Shannon and the Glasgow School of Art for example - brought Cayley Robinson closer to the occult revival of the period, including the Golden Dawn and esotericism. This context also infused his artworks. From the late 1890s, Cayley Robinson developed his own distinctive oeuvre of artistic expression which combined simple, quiet domesticity – the everyday - with hints of the occult, the mysterious, the wondrous.

In recent decades, Cayley Robinson's work has been exhibited in Tate exhibitions, Chasing Happiness at the Fitzwilliam Museum, (2006-7), which displayed his illustrations for Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird and the Acts of Mercy exhibition at the National Gallery (2010). The latter displayed striking mural works, rescued and purchased by the Wellcome Trust in 2007.

Many of Cayley Robinson’s artworks are featured in the exhibition Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art, 1880-1930, (Leamington Spa Art Gallery, 13th May - 18th September, 2022 and the Watts Gallery, Artist's Village, Compton, October, 2022- February, 2023). A publication entitled Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art, 1880-1930 was produced to coincide with the exhibition.

The publication features essays by scholars Tim Barringer, Colin Cruise, Charlotte Gere, Jan Marsh, Elizabeth Prettejohn and Sarah Victoria Turner.

The book is edited with an introduction and catalogue by Alice Eden.[1] The exhibition displays Cayley Robinson alongside many of his peers working in similar ways, engaging with revivals as well as their modern historic moment.

---

[1] Alice Eden, (ed.), Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art 1880-1930, (Leamington: Warwick District Council and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2022)

---

Biography

Born on 18 August 1862, in Brentford-on-Thames, Middlesex, Frederick Cayley Robinson was the son of an engineer. He studied at the St. John's Wood Art School, London, and from 1885 to 1888 at the Royal Academy Schools. Early on Cayley Robinson painted scenes of the sea, in the fashionable Newlyn style, and from 1889 to 1891 he sailed off in a boat around Britain. When he returned, Cayley Robinson studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1891-1894.

The artist married the painter Winifred Lucy Dalley in 1898 and they had one daughter. From 1898 to 1901, like many artists of the period, Cayley Robinson visited Florence and during that time studied the Old Masters and techniques such as tempera. In 1904, Cayley Robinson became a founder member of the Society of Painters in Tempera. This brought him in contact with a number of other like-minded artists, notably Mary Sargant Florence and Lady Christiana Herringham, both of whom were involved with the suffrage movement.

A central theme of Cayley Robinson’s paintings was enchantment. He produced very popular illustrations and set designs for the Haymarket Theatre production in London of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird in 1910. For the period 1907-1914, Cayley Robinson was connected with the London based Art Theosophical Circle, a group which sought forms of artistic enchantment in the modern world. The artist contributed illustrations for their published journal Orpheus.

In 1914, Cayley Robinson moved with his family into 1 Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Road, Kensington, London. This was a custom-built studio apartment block inhabited solely by artists. In the same year, the artist took up his only teaching professorship, at the Glasgow School of Art, which he held for ten years.

Frederick Cayley Robinson died of influenza on 3 January 1927 in a nursing home at 1 Ladbroke Square, Kensington; he was survived by his wife.

Further reading

Eden, Alice (ed.), Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art 1880-1930, (Leamington: Warwick District Council and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2022)

Eden, Alice, Spirituality, Feminism, Pre-Raphaelitism in Modern British Art and Culture, (Forthcoming, Routledge, London and New York, 2023)

Eden, Alice Anne, ‘Women, Representation and the Spiritual in the Works of Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, (2016).

Munro, Jane, Chasing Happiness: Maurice Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird and England, (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2006)

Turner, Sarah Victoria, ‘Spiritual Rhythm’ and ‘Material Things’: Art, Cultural Networks and Modernity in Britain, c. 1900-1914, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The Courtauld Institute, (2009)

Exhibitions

During his lifetime, Cayley Robinson regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of British Painters and held several important solo shows.

Whilst neglected for much of the twentieth century, Robert Upstone curated an important exhibition in 2010: the National Gallery displayed six works by Cayley Robinson including the four panels of the Acts of Mercy series in the Sunley Room. The exhibition ran from 14 July to 17 October.

External links

• 24 artworks by or after Frederick Cayley Robinson at the Art UK site
• Tate Gallery biography
• National Gallery exhibition 2010
• BBC website audio slideshow
• Review of the 2010 exhibition Evening Standard
• Review of the 2010 exhibition The Guardian
• Slideshow of the 'Acts of Mercy' The Guardian
• Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections

На других языках

---

- [en] Frederick Cayley Robinson

---

[fr] Frederic Cayley Robinson

Frederic Cayley Robinson est un peintre anglais né le 18 août 1862 à Brentford à l'ouest de Londres, et mort à Londres le 4 janvier 1927[1].

---

[it] Frederic Cayley Robinson

Frederic Cayley Robinson (Brentford, 18 agosto 1862 – Londra, 4 gennaio 1927) è stato un pittore inglese, decoratore e illustratore. Robinson è noto in particolare per la serie di affreschi intitolata "Acts of Mercy", realizzata nel Middlesex Hospital.

---

[ru] Робинсон, Фредерик Кейли

Фредерик Кейли Робинсон (англ. Frederick Cayley Robinson; 18 августа 1862, Брентфорд, Лондон, Великобритания — 4 января 1927, Великобритания) — британский художник, представитель символизма и викторианской сказочной живописи.

---

---