Frederick Cayley Robinson

Frederick Cayley Robinson ARA (18 August 1862 – 4 January 1927) was an English artist who created paintings and applied art, including book illustrations and theatre set designs.

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 Britain, London), which was bought by the Chantrey Bequest for the nation.

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.

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, and the wondrous.

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.

In 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.

Whilst neglected for much of the twentieth century, there has been an increase in the exhibition of Cayley Robinson's work in the twenty-first century: 2006-7: Chasing Happiness at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which displayed his illustrations for Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird 2010: the National Gallery displayed six works by Cayley Robinson including the four panels of the Acts of Mercy mural series, which had been rescued and purchased by the Wellcome Trust in 2007 2022-23: Many of Cayley Robinson's artworks featured in the exhibition Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art, 1880-1930 at the Leamington Spa Art Gallery, 13 May - 18 September 2022 and the Watts Gallery, Compton from October 2022- February 2023).