Design for a War Memorial

Born in Brentford-on-Thames, the son of a stockbroker, Robinson began his artistic training at the St John’s Wood Academy and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1885. After a time sailing around the English coast he continued his studies for three years at the Academie Julian, Paris. His earliest work was naturalistic but under the influence of Puvis de Chavannes and Burne-Jones he developed a symbolist style. In 1914 he moved to Lansdowne House, Holland Park, the block of studios built by Edmund Davis and already occupied by Ricketts and Shannon. For same year he was appointed Professor of Figure Composition and Decoration at Glasgow School of Art, necessitating his being in Scotland for several months every year. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, Royal Watercolour Society, New English Art Club and elsewhere, holding one-man shows at the Biallie, Carfax and Leicester galleries. In addition to his distinctive paintings with their simplified forms, firm outlines and restricted tones he also designed for the theatre and worked as an illustrator and muralist. A memorial exhibition was held at the Royal Academy in 1928 and Leicester Galleries in 1929. This design for a World War I memorial remembers the New Zealand, Canadian, Australian and British fallen from the Battle of Courtrai, October 1918 and the bringing of the news of the Armistice to war ravaged people of Belgium. Cayley Robinson designed several war memorials, the most important being the World War Memorial to the Students of Heanor Grammar School, now in the collection of South East Derbyshire College. As with many artists of the time, the theme of the Great War influence several of his major works including the Acts of Mercy series, painted between 1916 and 1920 for The Middlesex Hospital and now in the collection of the Wellcome Collection.