Posts - Page 95 of 96

Mr Bawden designs a railway poster

You’d think that the subject of the Morphet’s auction had been well and truly exhausted – it was only a poster sale after all. But there was one more thing I wanted to say about it, and that’s Edward Bawden.

I knew he’d done some rather wonderful London Transport posters before now.

This one was also in the Morphets sale (estimate £150-£200, sold for £1200, I say no more). It’s half of a pair poster from 1952 and is rather wonderful.

But what really surprised me was this.

For the very simple reason that I had no idea that he had ever designed a railway poster. It’s from 1954 and is a Quad Royal depicting the York mystery plays*. The National Railway Museum collection only has this one. Are there any more out there that I don’t know about? Or is it unique?

*And it only went for £440, so with hindsight I wish I’d bit a bit more bravely on it. Never mind.

These classic posters, they’re all rubbish you know

Matching poster to artist, one local auction at a time…

auctions

A few interesting posters are coming up for auction next week at Dreweatt’s Bristol salerooms (if I remember rightly, they’re the ones in the converted church right at the top of Clifton).

Seven lots of posters have come from the family of the artist Percy Drake Brookshaw. I’d never heard his name before, but this poster is very familiar.

That’s mainly because it has come round at specialist poster auctions a few times. It’s a good bit of 50s near-kitch, and so will probably go for rather more than the £60-80 estimate. And now I know who designed it, so that’s something.

If you follow the above link to the London Transport Museum, you will see that Brookshaw designed some rather wonderful pre-war images for them. Sadly, the posters that his family saved belong to his rather more whimsical post-war style, like this 1956 eulogy to Torquay.

The only other image which made me raise an eyebrow was the Post Office poster below.

That’s mainly because the more I look, the more of these ‘properly packed parcels please’ posters I discover. We’ve got four to start with (I don’t quite know why because they are giant 40″ x 30″ Quad Crowns and I don’t think we’ll ever have the wall space for them), and they’re unusually good bits of 60s design. I’ll blog about them properly one day.

6RP7324X32BP

Railway posters vs design

railway posters

It was a long day, watching the Morphets auction. And as all of those posters went buy, one after another going for way more than the Crownfolio budget, I found myself getting more and more jaded. Until, by the end of the auction, I was quite glad that we’d only bought one single lot.

It wasn’t just that I was gorged on posters – although the experience was a bit like trying to eat a whole box of chocolates at once. Seeing so many ‘classic’ railway posters together made me realise that (heresy alert here) the majority of them are not actually great pieces of design.

Of course, your average railway poster does have a lot of things going for it. Nice watercolours, pictures of pretty parts of the countryside or heritage; a nostalgic vision of a Britain long gone. A lovely thing to hang on your wall.

But when you look at them as pieces of poster design, it’s hard to get enthusiastic, particularly about the post-war breed. The typography is average at best, and not integrated into the poster, while the images themselves are hardly cutting-edge illustration. Of course there are some wonderful posters, like the one below, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

In the end – faced with five hundred of them laid end to end at the Morphets auction – it’s hard not to see the vast majority of railways posters as not only safe, but even a bit reactionary. A nicely drawn vision of a Britain of plough-horses and fields, ancient cathedrals and Georgian towns, and, of course, steam trains. Easy on the eye, not modern, not threatening – and not much different to buying a Victorian sketch of trees and a few cows to go over the fireplace.

This may seem a bit harsh, but I think it’s fair. Because the other distinguishing factor of the auction was that some of the more striking and modern posters were the ones that didn’t get the highest prices. The Lander above (which I love) only went for £300.

And Crownfolio’s only purchase of the whole long day was this.

Which is lovely – and was also one of the only posters not even to reach its estimate. So perhaps it’s a good thing that railway poster collectors aren’t in it for the design, it may yet still leave a few bargains for those of us who are.

The biggest poster auction ever. Perhaps.

auctions

As mentioned below, the Morphets sale last month was a one-off spectacular the likes of which may not be seen again for some time.

This was certainly true in the Crownfolio household, where the event involved three computers (two downstairs for watching while child-minding and cooking, one upstairs for actually placing bids) and an entire day spent in front of screens watching one poster after another reach what seemed to be eye-watering prices. I don’t think my nerves can stand anything like that again for some time to come.

Morphets themselves are trumpeting it as “The biggest and most important sale of posters that has ever been held…” But was it really?

It certainly wasn’t the biggest in terms of turnover. The sale realised £410,000, which Christies, and I am sure many other auctioneers, have definitely surpassed before.

Then what about the prices? I for one had hoped that a combination of the recession and the sheer quantity of posters on offer all at once would mean that on the whole prices might be low (subtext, and we could pick up a bargain or two). But as poster after poster flashed past, the overwhelming impression was of new highs being reached with almost every lot going for at least a hundred, sometimes several hundred pounds over its estimate.

£400

Now, however, in the cold light of day, the prices don’t seem to have been breaking records, more at the low end of average. (Disclaimer: I’ve only checked the items I was interested in, along with a few star lots – if other things did perform well, please do let me know!) But what did make the achieved prices seem dramatic were the surprisingly low estimates. Perhaps they had also thought that the recession would have left everyone too broke to buy so many posters.

So sale volume, good but not exceptional, prices good too – but so far no cigar. And probably not the greatest poster auction ever held.

But what was genuinely extraordinary was having so many railway posters being sold in one place. Whereas your average Christies or Onslows sale might have twenty, thirty, perhaps a few more in amongst the Mucha and friends, here that’s all there was: different periods, different styles and different destinations all the way from the first lot to number 593 ten hours later. So yes, if you like railway posters, it was probably about as big as it’s ever going to get.

But as we slowly worked our way through every region of Britain and Ireland, I gradually came to realise one thing. Which is that I don’t really like many railway posters very much. And the more I saw of them, the less I liked them. I’ll try and explain why in my next post.

Q.E.D.

eBay

This is an extra bonus post because, as if to underline what I said yesterday, this – or rather these as there are two of them on offer – popped up on eBay as well.

It’s a brilliant piece of design, but would I ever frame it and hang it on the wall? Not really. I don’t even want to just buy it and own it and stash it with all the ones that live under the spare bed, Perhaps my taste simply isn’t good enough.

And in case you’re thinking that £50 seems a bit of a steal for this, even on the Bay, double check the dimensions. It’s only 20 x 15 (ish, it seems to have shrunk a bit in the wash).