Robert Gossop was apprenticed to a wallpaper and fabric and designer, whilst attending art classed at Birkbeck College and Hammersmith College of Art. Following a visit to America in 1913, he became the first art editor of British Vogue. During the First Wold War he worked at the Ministry of Information. In 1923 he founded his own firm of artists’ agents, R P Gossop Ltd, with the artist Edmund J Sullivan. He continued to work as a freelance designer, clients included London Transport, Empire Marketing Board and Ambrose Heal. He was a co-founded, with Milner Gray, of the Society of Industrial Artists, and served on the Council of the Design Industries Association.