Robert Artis

1929-1935

Worked at London studio until 1935, then Dartford printworks until 1939.

Robert Artis was born in Tring, Hertfordshire, in 1909. He began his studies at Bromley and Beckenham School of Art but left to work for J. S. Wheelwright, a freelance textile designer in Tonbridge, from 1925-9. He then joined Warner & Sons in 1929, working as an in-house print designer from the London studio. In 1935, he moved to the Dartford Print Works, where he remained until the factory closed in 1939. During and after the war he worked for Vickers, a British engineering firm, on the design and development of armaments. He died in 1988. Some of the fabrics he designed at Warner & Sons include ‘Hatton Garden’, designed from the seventeenth-century panels on the walls of an old house in Hatton Garden, as well as ‘Seashells’, which was adapted from a silk brocade, ‘Conchus’ by William Folliott from 1873.