Winifred Lucy ROBINSON

Winifred Lucy ROBINSON
nee Dalley, Mrs Cayley-
1861
1936
fl 1909

The artist was born in Croydon, Surrey, into the comfortable home of stockbroker John Lambert Dalley and his wife Mary. She had two younger siblings, and the family was looked after by four servants. Before her marriage and while still a pupil at the Kensington School of Art, she exhibited her paintings as Winifred Dalley. The wife of the artist Frederick Cayley ROBINSON, she was also an extremely accomplished illustrator. The couple married in December of 1898 in Bradford on Avon, Somerset.

Her known illustrated works on Cornish subjects are The Children's Book of Gardening (12 Full-page illustrations in colour from drawings) authored by her friends Mrs Alfred Sidgwick (Cecily SIDGWICK) and Mrs Paynter, and Loveday Hambly and her Friends, by L V Hodgkins. In the former book, the dedication is made to three children: Betty (Paynter), Barbara (Cayley-Robinson) and Cyril (a nephew of the novelist Mrs Sidgwick, who had no children of her own) - all of St Buryan and Lamorna. About Barbara is written, 'she is a traveller, and can have no garden of her own; but she sets daffodils in her friends' gardens, and is content to see them, with her inward eye, dancing in the breeze for their delight.'

The reference to travel is apt, for the Cayley-Robinsons lived in London, travelled frequently to Cornwall, and one of Frederick's posts was a Professorship at the Glasgow Institute. She survived her husband and died, age 72 in their Kensington home.

media

Painter of flowers, figures and landscapes, illustrator

works and access

Access to works: illustrations for The Children's Book of Gardening (12 Full-page illustrations in colour from drawings) and Loveday Hambly and her Friends (Hodgkins)

exhibitions

Ridley Art Club (16)

references

Census 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901; GRO documents

Hardie (2009) Artists in Newlyn and West Cornwall (p265)

Hardie (1992) In Time & Place, Lamorna

Her own titles (WCAA)

Johnson & Greutzner (under Dalley)

Tovey, David (2022) Lamorna - An Artistic, Social and Literary History - Volume I - Pre-1920, Wilson Books