Horniman Library Anthropology Books

This still life painting was made in the Horniman Library in London.  The Museum’s founder, Frederick John Horniman (1835-1906) was chairman and managing director of the Horniman Tea Company.  Frederick Horniman was the son of John Horniman (1803-1892) who first established the Horniman Tea Company in the Isle of Wight. They were the first tea manufacurers to sell tea in machine-sealed packets.  Frederick Horniman collected a huge range of objects from around the world, mostly bought from other travellers.  Travel books make up a large part of his book collection and reflect his international trading routes. He has many different types of ornate books from bibles to world travel and anthropology books.

Category:

Additional information

Medium

Oil on wood panel

Year

2016

Original / Edition

Original work of art

Size

48 x 64 cm

Description

Ian Robinson’s work is concerned with obsessions and the back-stories of collections.  Working mainly in still life he portrays his personal associations with these items in an attempt to capture the spirit, the soul, and the physiognomy of objects and our-selves as it is revealed through our passions.

Excerpt from A-N Review

For artist Ian Robinson, his photorealistic “portraits” of the objects of collections began when he was still at college, and he started to paint pictures of his own record collection. Upon moving to London, he suddenly found he had access to numerous other collections, including those of Sir John Soane, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, and Aby Warburg, and his focus switched from music to literature. He would visit the collections, make drawings and take photos, and then scale these up, sometimes by hand, sometimes by projecting the photograph on to the canvas, and paint them in minute detail over a period of months. The results are documents of documents, catalogues of catalogues, copies and replicas […]  Robinson is a young man, with talent and a passion for his work, and so I can only surmise that his series will continue to grow.

Ian has a First Class Ba (hons) Fine Art : Painting from University of the Arts London – Wimbledon College of Art – 2011. He is currently employed as an Artist in the studios of Patrick Hughes.

Go to Top