Melvyn Robinson’s Hill Drawings: the Yorkshire hills, hung with poems

Melvyn Robinson was born in Barnsley in 1933, the son of a miner, and the landscape he went on painting for the rest of his life was the one he walked as a boy: Kine Moor, Woolley Farm, Fox Holes, the hill forts, Boggard Wood. Eight watercolours from that long attachment, made between 1986 and 2001, are now at Cecil Sharp House, the home of English folk music and dance, until 11 January. They come from the artist’s own collection, and they are hung with something unusual: his poems and folk songs, printed and set beside the paintings.

The bare facts of the career are these. Robinson studied at Barnsley College of Art in 1950, at Manchester College of Art in 1955, and at Keele, where his interest in combined and integrated arts took shape. He taught art and music in London schools, then lectured at the College of Education in Cheshire through the 1970s, at Hackney College in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the London Institute in the 1990s and 2000s. His first solo exhibition was at the Acme Gallery in Covent Garden in 1978; he showed at the Cooper Art Gallery, the Air Gallery, the Mile End Art Pavilion, the Mall Galleries, the Bankside Gallery and Hackney Museum, worked with Whitechapel Community Arts across East London, and held open studios at Acme. His last exhibition was a retrospective for his eightieth birthday at the Mile End Art Pavilion in 2013.

Alongside all of it he was a working musician. He played with jazz groups in the 1950s and 1970s, most notably the Temperance Seven, and composed music for theatre, including Dreamer in the 1980s. That is the fact that makes the setting at Cecil Sharp House more than convenient: the paintings were made by someone who also played the tunes that folk revivals collect, and who thought a painting and a song could be two halves of the same argument.

The subjects are the marks people have left on the land, and the marks the land leaves on people. Cerne Abbas and Horn Dance, both from 1986, take the chalk giant and the antlered dancers as images already half way to myth. Earth Mother (1991) lies down in the landscape rather than standing over it. The works from 2000 and 2001, Wolf Lea, Apocalyptic Horse, Maypole Dancing, Start Counting and Walls, return to the Yorkshire hillside itself, where the older sources – Celtic, Viking and Anglo-Saxon – are present as habits of looking rather than as illustration.

The risk in a show like this is that the paintings become evidence for the folklore, and stop being paintings. What keeps them from it is the watercolour itself: these are not diagrams of a lost religion but weather, wet ground and the thin light of a northern hillside, with figures that are often small enough to be mistaken for stones. Robinson came to the hill figures through the land he had known first, which is the opposite of how most of us meet them.

The poems make the argument explicit, and sometimes too explicit. Cerne Abbas is a sequence of oppositions – generation and destruction, instinct and intellect, libido and destrudo – that reads like a man thinking aloud in front of the figure rather than a caption for it. Not an Appeal to Stone Age Religion is angrier, and better: “Awaken, mother earth, awake. / Did you sleep three thousand years?” it begins, and goes on to count cathedrals, kingdoms, citadels, nations, empires and posh hotels among the things built on human fear. The poems are dated by the artist and were written to stand with the paintings, not to explain them, and the exhibition lets you take them or leave them.

There is a family story behind the show as well. It has been assembled by Robinson’s daughter, Rosetta, who wrote to us about her late father’s work and then sent the paintings, the biography, the poems and the songs, and who has answered every question about captions and credits. The photographs of the works are by Ferdy Carabott. The exhibition is, in the plainest sense, an act of recovery: work made over two decades, kept in the family, and put back in front of an audience in a building built for the songs that accompany it.

Cecil Sharp House is at 2 Regent’s Park Road, London NW1 7AY. Melvyn Robinson: Hill Drawings runs from 15 September 2026 to 11 January 2027. Details and opening hours are on the English Folk Dance and Song Society website.