Autumn 1912

Charles Robinson painted this watercolour illustration, ‘Autumn’, sometime between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here, Robinson depicts an allegorical figure of Autumn, as a winged young girl, walking on fallen leaves and holding branches of berries. Robinson was a popular illustrator during the Golden Age of British book illustration, alongside contemporaries like Arthur Rackham and Walter Crane. His illustrations often featured in books for children. The sentimentality and aestheticism of this work were characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late Victorian era. Robinson's work provided an escape from industrialisation for those who sought refuge in a romanticised vision of nature and childhood innocence. To understand more about the artistic context of this image, we can look into the institutional history of art education, illustration, and printing in Britain, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, using primary source documents held in public archives. By doing so, the changing roles of art and illustration can be fully explored.