Isabella and the Pot of Basil

Robinson was born in Barton Regis, Gloucestershire. He attended Clifton College and the Royal West of England Academy followed by an apprenticeship with the stained glass artist Christopher Whall. It was in Whall’s studio that he met and befriended the glass designers Karl Parsons and Edward Woore. During World War I he initially enlisted in the Artists Rifles and was then released from military service to manage a shell factory and to act as an Air Raid Warden in Bristol. Three of his four younger brothers were killed in the Great War. Working with Woore he undertook commissions from the Bristol based stained glass firm of Joseph Bell & Sons. Much of the work was for West Country churches, one of the more prominent commissions being the Civil Defence windows for Bristol Cathedral. He later became a director of the firm and, in 1923, the eventual owner. He was heavily involved with the Bristol Guild of Applied Art, which had been established in 1908. In 1918 he and two others purchased the Guild and ran it as a business making it one of Bristol’s most successful shops and Arts centre.