Daphne Padden Archives - Page 2 of 8

Love and money

auctions, eBay

A proper post is brewing and will follow tomorrow, but this is just a brief appearance to let you know that all your Valentines poster needs are solved.

I’ve mentioned this Dorrit Dekk poster before, and now it has appeared on eBay, not once but twice. It ought to go really, it’s just the kind of thing that would sell for a lot more in the right kind of shop, even if it is mounted on some kind of board.

While we’re on the subject of eBay, can I also just remind you that the Quad Royal Daphne Padden prints are also now available on that esteemed shopping site.

They’re very competitively priced, especially when compared with this little gem.

The auction has ended, but until last week it has been on offer for £1,350. A figure which completely boggled my mind because in the auction at which we bought the Eckersley last week, a copy of this went for, I think, about £300.

Now normally, I would laugh and point, saying that this hasn’t even been restored and how much do you expect me to pay for a frame? But that’s not going to work here. For one thing, the auction has been ended because the item is no longer available, which I suspect means they have sold it. More tellingly than that, they received a Best Offer on it of £1,200. Really, truly I do wish I had the sheer gall to be a dealer. I’d make a fortune. But I have no such ability in me, so you’re all safe.

All of which means that I can make no comment on their one remaining poster, except to say that if you would like to buy this Norman Wilkinson poster for £1,850, you know where you can go.

Meanwhile, for those of us without the best part of two grand burning a hole in their pockets, this National Savings poster of Shipping through the Ages currently has no bids at just £3.99.

Or this slightly more appealing example of the National Savings genre could be yours for £6.99

Or we could all just give up and collect thimbles.

Something fishy going on

posters

I had a theory when I started on this post, but after some research I have now authoritatively blown it out of the water (the pun in that will become apparent later on). However it’s still an interesting journey to travel, so this post will mostly be me showing my workings in order to prove myself wrong. Never mind.

The starting point is this rather wonderful object that arrived in my inbox over the weekend.

Oh that the object itself had turned up.

It’s a version of Daphne Padden’s Royal Blue fisherman, painted onto glass for some coach office somewhere. Having been kept by an employee of Royal Blue, it’s been bought by a transport collector. I am very envious.

But it got me back to thinking about Daphne Padden and fishermen. As I’ve posted relatively recently, she liked them quite a lot, and kept going back to them as a motif.

I’ve tended to think of them as being Cornish fishermen, but as it turns out, they’re not. Here’s another one of hers, for example, advertising the delights of East Anglia.

I don’t own this poster and have had to borrow it from The Lark’s Flickr stream, so thanks to them.

But these fishermen weren’t just a quirk of Daphne Padden’s. At about the same period, Harry Stevens was also mining a very similar vein of imagery.

Both to advertise Cornwall (the artwork above) and East Anglia as well.

Mr Crownfolio has always reckoned that this poster is Harry Stevens’ affectionate pastiche of Daphne Padden’s Royal Blue poster. But I’m intrigued that they’re both starting to use the same imagery at about the same time.

Because either side of the war, the attraction of fishing ports was always the red-sailed boats themselves. Here’s Ronald Lampitt in 1936 and Frank Sherwin, possibly from 1946.

The red sails are, it will not surprise you to learn, also used to advertise East Anglian destinations, in this case by Frank Mason.

Now this is where I was all prepared to work out a neat little theory about the evolution of nostalgia. There must have come a time when the red sails had so completely disappeared that they could no longer be used as a sign for the fishing port, not even in a past tense kind of way. But the fishermen were still there on the quay, so they came to be the new signifier for this kind of place.

Except there is one great big fly in this ointment, which is that one particular fisherman had been extolling the joys of the seaside a long time before any of these posters were designed. It is of course this one, John Hassell’s jolly fisherman for Skegness.

That version is from 1926, but he goes back as far as 1908, and also persists for a very long time. Here’s Frank Newbould reworking him in 1935.

While here’s another one from 1962.

So my theory is, well, not exactly watertight. Please feel free to prove it wrong in any other ways you choose.

Going Postal

other, posters

The blog has been a little bit overlooked lately. Apologies for that, I’ve had a rather urgent appointment with some wallpaper that needed to be removed. It’s been a bad time to be distracted as well, because people – well the readers of this blog to be precise – have been sending me things. And they’ve been rather good.

Let’s start with these, mostly because I asked for them. ‘Did Daphne Padden design any other leaflets for British Railways?’, I asked the other day. The answer is a resounding yes.

And here’s another, although I’ll be blowed if I have any idea what a ‘Radio Cruise’ is. Can anyone enlighten me?

She even designed the insides of this one too.

Which include this rather fine map.

Are there more out there? I hope so, although I am anticipating that I might have to do something frightening, like attend a transport ephemera fair, to find them.

Meanwhile through the actual mail box came a small set of these little London Transport prints – I’m sure there is a precise art historical word for what they are but I’m afraid I don’t know it. Anyway, they were a fantastic gift all the way from America so thank you very much.

What I got was four little folders, each containing a small print of a London Transport poster from 1953. Here’s St James’ Palace by David Lewis.

Each print was the pictorial half of a pair poster, so making the transfer to prints quite well. I can’t decide whether my favourite is the John Bainbridge or the Sheila Robinson (both artists who deserve further notice on this blog one day).

I have no idea, however, what the purpose of these were. Were they bought by the public and framed, or where they sent out by London Transport as a form of publicity? Or some other reason that I can’t even guess at. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.

While we’re on the subject of London Transport, this is also rather good.

This also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to mention the work of artist Micah Wright for a while. He’s been working on ironic modern versions of propaganda posters for a while, and got in contact with the blog to say that we might like this take on Pat Keely. He was right.

Most of what he does is American in origin, but it’s still very much worth taking a look at his PropagandaRemix website.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a wall that needs demolishing. But if you’ve got anything else to send me in the meantime, please feel free.

Loves a sailor

archives, designers

An errand sent me rummaging through our stack of Daphne Padden bits and bobs the other day. This made me realise two things. One is that they really ought to be in an archive box, something which has been on my to do list for too long. The other – more relevant here – is that I never got round to scanning much of it in order that you lot could take a look at them. It’s time to make amends, clearly. Here’s a thoughtful bird to start with.

For those who weren’t around last year (where were you?), the executive summary is as follows. After Daphne Padden’s death in 2009, a lot of her posters came up for auction in 2010. We got in contact with the executors after this, and ended up buying a miscellany of drawings, sketches, designs and, well, other stuff which hadn’t been included in the auction.

Most of the archive has gone to the Brighton University Archive of Art and Design where it can be consulted by historians and designers (more exciting developments on this next month too) but we kept a few small pieces that we might want to display one of these days. I posted pictures of a few of them when they arrived, but but promised more. That was some time ago. Oops.

This was the item which particularly made me feel remiss. I swear I had never seen it before, although Mr Crownfolio assures me I have.

It’s done in real detail but very small (just over 10cm high) and in a little paper folder, so I like to think that this was what she presented to the coach company as a proposal. This is of course the poster commission which resulted, although it does exist with a couple of different varients in its lettering.

She obviously liked this series of posters a great deal. I’ve posted this study before, but it was all part of the same collection of things she kept over the years.

Along with this much rougher sketch, on a torn piece of brown paper.

There’s nothing similar for any of her other designs, so she must have felt a real sentimental attachment for this one.

Also of interest are a couple of proofs for British Railways leaflets. This one is helpfully stamped 1963.

Along with them is one finished leaflet, which looks as though it’s from a slightly different series.

(In case you also worry about these things as much as I do, the BR in-house printing department definitely did the inside on this one, it’s not very exciting at all.)

Once again, I would have had no idea that she’d designed these without this evidence. I also have no idea where to start looking for them in the great sea of ephemera out there, so if anyone can point me at some more, I’d be very interested to see them.

Finally, there is this. I have no idea what it is for or even if it was by her at all, but I rather like it.

What do you think?

Odd and odder

eBay

This week, Ebay seems mostly to be selling oddities. And the oddest of the odd has to be this, a redacted Daphne Padden poster for £9.99.

It would be rather nice if they hadn’t done that, wouldn’t it?

The listing does at least give a bit of provenance:

we understand that this advertisement was displayed in the Post Office Savings Bank Kew until it closed down , 1975 we believe.

My guess was that they rather liked this poster, and so when the Post Office Savings Bank changed its name, they just blacked it out and carried on. There’s another example from the same place and seller as well.

Neither, I’d suggest, are worth buying, but still an interesting object.

As is this. Which isn’t a poster so I strongly suggest that you don’t spend the best part of £30 on it.

I can’t tell you anything useful about the design either, other than that it is rather good and I would guess prewar. Does anyone know any more? I may also return to addressing youths in that way too.

Meanwhile this poster is odd in every which way: it’s a rare survival of a commercial advertisement, it’s for an event I’ve never ever heard of and I had no idea such things went on at the Albert Hall.

It also doesn’t look very British, by which I think I mostly mean that I’ve never really seen anything like it. It’s actually just finished as I was writing this piece, but sold for just £58, and I would think it’s worth a lot more than that to the right classic car owning buyer.

Is this Tom Purvis – well they say it is – World War Two poster odd or not? I can’t decide.

Perhaps the frame makes it look a bit strange, because it is after all a workaday poster which was just there to tell people what to do, not be a work of art. Good to see it, though, because very few of these kinds of things do survive precisely because they aren’t as good to look at as an Abram Games or Lewitt Him from the same period.

There are one or two sensible things too, like this British Railways poster for Right Labelling which the seller has down as 1960s but I might put a bit earlier.

Along with this pair of classic railway posters for Inverness and Somerset respectively.

There are a couple of other map posters being sold by the same seller too, so if that’s your kind of thing, you know where to go.

But I do wonder whether he’s going to get any offers. Recently I said that prices on eBay seem to be matching those at auction. This was a hostage to fortune, and eBay has since then concentrated on proving me wrong. Take this classic London Transport poster, for example.

It got plenty of bidding attention, but at £188 failed to reach its reserve.

Elsewhere, this British Railways poster failed to sell at just £48.

One of Frank Newbould’s more peculiar turns if you ask me.

What’s to blame for this? Is it the new Greek market turmoil, or just the good weather keeping everyone away from their computers? Answers in the comments below please.

On the buses

eBay, Uncategorized

Last week, Mr Crownfolio and I scored that increasingly rare thing, a bargain on eBay. Although this did involve us chancing a reasonably large sum of money on what was described as

a lot of old railway posters that i got when i was turning out my grandparents old house they are at a ruff guess about 25 plus

along with a picture that didn’t give a lot away.

A bit of additional description says that there were some half-page posters as well as some full page ones, but we had no idea what would turn up. Well apart from this, of course.

And the knowledge that at least some of the posters would have tatty edges.

Fortunately we weren’t disappointed. As a starter, this Alan Durman on its own would have been quite enough to keep us happy.

Fortunately there were more goodies even than that.

But what I don’t think we’ve ended up with is a set of railway posters. The Butlins one does say ‘Travel by Train’ at the bottom, but there’s no British Railways logo or anything. More importantly, they’re all 20″ x 30″, so standard advertising display size, Double Crown, rather than British Railways standard display size of 40″ x 25″ or Double Royal. To prove my point, here is the Alan Durman Butlins poster as a Double Royal with the British Railways logo on.

I don’t think I will be complaining about the misdescription though. Because Double Crown wasn’t just the preserve of commercial advertisers. The other big advertisers who used it as standard were the coach companies, and that’s what I think we’ve got here, a batch of coach posters. Which isn’t a very difficult deduction to make looking at a set of posters like these.

The bottom one is by Lander and is I think particularly nice. If you needed any more persuading, this one even says coach on it, with a handy picture too.

That seems pretty certain then. Even better, there are some good posters amongst the lot, not least of which is this Daphne Padden.

There are also some artists I’ve not come across before. These two posters are signed Greene.

I think this is John Greene, quite possibly working with his wife Margaret too. But I’m not going to go off on a research digression for once, they can wait for another day. Meanwhile one of my favourites isn’t signed at all.

There are few more as well, and among them a set of these oddities.

Mr Crownfolio reckons that these must have been put up by the various stops at bus stations so that people knew they were getting on the right coach. But if there’s a transport historian out there with a better theory, do let me know.

Now we just need to decide what to do with a whole heap of posters with a lot of blank space on. Perhaps we’ll frame them on magnetic backing and use them as notice boards. Even then, we’ve probably still got quite a lot…