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