railway poster Archives - Page 11 of 16

The thick of it

auctions

It’s impossible to get a sense of the Morphet’s sale while it’s still yelling away in the corner of my screen, but two brief observations from yesterday.

Firstly, what kind of a mad world is it where this costs £160

while this

costs hundreds more. I don’t understand, I really don’t.

I also noticed this go past yesterday.

Same picture, four different towns. That’s cheating. But does anyone know where it is really?

But much more exciting is that we won this wonderful Amstutz.

It’s been on this blog’s ‘About Us’ page since the very start. And now it’s going to be on our walls. Hurrah for that.

More on the sale next week, once I’ve sold all my household goods, cats and anything else that might meet the bill. And built a few more walls to hang everything on.

Another thing that Morphets has made me think about is the work of Lander, Reginald Montague Lander to be precise. (I used to think he was called Eric, perhaps as the result of a misattribution somewhere, but he isn’t. So there.)

Now, I am a huge fan of his work, mainly as a result of this poster.

It’s a poster I have a sentimental spot for, because it’s the first one I ever bought at auction. But I also think it’s brilliant; it’s a modernist re-imagining of the great tradition of railway Quad Royal landscape posters in a way that really works. I can’t think of another poster quite like it. (Apologies for the flash reflection, by the way, it’s an unfortunate side-effect of framing things).

So, considering that he can produce posters as great as this, why doesn’t he get more recognition for his work? There are a couple of reasons I think.

One is that, reinforcing Paul Rennie’s point of the other day, his stuff rather falls between two stools. The vast majority of his posters were produced for British Railways. But they’re not (with the odd exception above) the kind of nostalgic landscapes that railway collectors really fall for. So the railway buffs don’t much care for his stuff, and the mid-century modernists don’t notice him that much because, well, it’s railway posters. (Almost all the images here come from the National Railway Museum via the NMSI search engine, as you can see. No one else seems to have any quantities of his work at all).

He did produce a few images which are instantly recognisable, and do sell, in particular these two for Paignton, both from 1956-ish.

At its best, his work can hold its own with any of the designers of the time, as the images above, and this 1960 poster show.

But part of the problem is that he can’t be pinned down to a recognisable Lander style. He did cheerful cartoons in the style of Amstutz and Bruce Angrave, or even early Tom Eckersley.

(Original painting from 1960, poster from 1961).

He could do more traditional railway posters too; these are from 1957, and the second one reminds me a great deal of Percy Drake Brookeshaw, although with slightly less migraine-inducing colours.

He could do you whimsical neoclassical or modern text if you wanted, too.

He was also very good at drawing complicated buildings.

But this great long list also hints at the other problem with his work. He was so prodigously productive, that not every poster of his is great, or even good. How could they be when he seemed to be churning out a poster every other day?

But that’s not a reason to under-estimate his great designs. He still deserves to be seen by more than just railway poster fanatics.

It’s also worth noting that his extraordinary energy meant that he carried on as a poster designer for far longer than almost anyone else. We’ve got a selection of BR posters of his from 1978. And the NMSI collection includes a set of designs from 1980, including this.

I had no idea that anything of the sort was being commissioned by then.

Finally, should I have persuaded you about Mr Lander’s work, Hastings and the Plymouth poster above are both for sale at Morphets tomorrow and Thursday, estimated at £75-125 and £1oo-150 respectively, along with fifty or more others.

Hurry now, it’s almost time to get your bids in.

Too many auctions

auctions

Today, for a bit of light relief, I’m going to write about some auctions that aren’t Morphets (although, fear not, a normal service will return later this week).

To start with, Wallis and Wallis down in Lewes are selling yet more of their seemingly inexhaustible supply of World War Two propaganda posters.

I’m not going to go into much detail, partly because it’s much the same as the last three times, but mainly because the Wallis and Wallis website is so infuriating. Most of the posters aren’t illustrated at all, and I can’t find out what anything made at the previous sales because it simply won’t tell me.

They have at least photographed these three rather fine posters that I think are by Pat Keely. Mind you, I’ve had to conclude that from squinting at the signatures, because the descriptions are rather vague. But I like them, and haven’t seen them illustrated elsewhere.

I’m also minded to try and advance to Air Artificer as well. Any suggestions as to how?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Swann Galleries are also having a poster sale.

A quick flick through the catalogue reinforces the point that Paul Rennie makes about his own collection in Modern British Posters,

British items were generally of little interest to international collectors and were, accordingly, less expensive to purchase

Fight your way through the swathes of American war posters and French Art Nouveau, but you still won’t find much from Britain here.

There are railway posters.

Of course there are railway posters. Although this set (lot 230), by Pat Keely for the Southern Region just before the outbreak of war, are more interesting than the average.

There are four in total, and they look even better en mass – a stylistic bridge between Art Deco and the simplifications of the post-war style. Worth a look.

There are also London Underground posters too. This is by Charles Burton, from 1930.

While this bus poster, by Fred Taylor, seems impossibly sleek and minimalist for 1923. It’s wonderful.

There’s some Hans Unger too, if all that’s a bit too pre-war for you.

It’s one half of a pair poster from 1957 and quite expensive at $400-600. We paid £130 for both halves not that long ago so let’s see what the Americans think it is worth.

Aside from the expected, there are also a few interesting odds and ends, like these BOAC posters for Earls Court Motor Shows. The first one is particularly good, and I’d love to know if anyone has any information on it.

There are also, not for the first time, dozens of American motivational posters. I’m rather intrigued by these, in a slightly horrified way. Were they the from the war or the depression? Were they produced by the government, or like educational posters, sold into workplaces? Does anyone know and can tell me?

But I rather like this one, although for all the wrong reasons.

It’s not just the libel against the Spanish, although that’s quite funny on its own; it’s also the fact that I think I’d have the siesta and the work-life balance of the Spaniard over the American motivational poster any day.

Finally, there’s this, which is here for no other reason than I like it very much indeed.

It’s like an Indian Daphne Padden. More of her stuff later this week, by the way.

Holiday Haunts

railway posters

Once again, I’m thinking about holidays. I actually have got round to booking the Crownfolios’ annual fortnight, but two things have brought my mind round to the subject again. Or to be precise, to Holiday Haunts. This was the railways’ annual guide to hotels, B&Bs, and other such places to stay in Britain, the idea being, of course, that you got there by train.

In the first place, the ever-attentive Mike Ashworth sent this over, pointing out that it was by Bruce Angrave.

Considering the date and the Art Deco style, it must have been one of the earliest things he did. Which is interesting enough on its own.

But it also, and unsurprisingly, got me thinking about Morphets, where a whole slew of Holiday Haunts material is for sale. Anyone fancy 20 volumes from the 50s and 60s for your shelves?

It’s lot 584 if you do.

Now, I know that we’re veering close to the dangerous territory of railway ephemera here, but bear with me. Can you see that Eckersley peeking out at the bottom left of that picture above? Well exactly. Here it is in full.

Now Holiday Haunts was a blockbuster publication. At the height of its success it sold over 200,000 copies a year, so covers like this, and indeed the Angrave above, would have meant modern design going into the homes of huge numbers of railway-travelling, seaside-holidaying people who perhaps wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. I hope they, or at least their dissident teenage children, liked it.

Because this is ephemera, I won’t go into too much detail but Holiday Haunts was originally created by the GWR in 1906,

reached its height in the 1920s and 30s,and was then continued by British Railways after nationalisation in 1947. And I am mostly telling you this because I have found this photo. It’s the 1930 edition of Holiday Haunts being printed at the old Butler and Tanner print works in Somerset.

These men were printing about 50 metres from where I am typing this now. I’d be able to see the building from my window, if they hadn’t taken the top two floors off when they converted it into flats. So, Holiday Haunts, printed right next door to Quad Royal. How about that.

But, in case you think me entirely lost to ephemera and local history, there is more purpose to this. Because designers like Eckersley and Games didn’t just design covers for Holiday Haunts, they also designed posters to advertise it. I’ve mentioned this Morphets lot already – there’s an Unger in there too.

Here’s a different version of the Eckersley poster, courtesy of VADS and the Eckersley archive.

But there were also carriage-print scale posters too (top right, below, again from Morphets).

But there’s more of an attraction for me in Holiday Haunts than just the great posters and the cover designs. It also evokes a nostalgia in me for a past I never had.

The kind of British seaside holiday where the sun shone every day and you could get tea in proper cups on the beach (I know this is true, I’ve seen it on railway posters). The kind of holiday where your family would stay in a camping coach. And like it.

(Riley, 1957, also on sale at Morphets. Isn’t everything.)

There are probably some clues in here about what posters – and particularly railway posters – mean today, and why they attract us so. Ah the past, when the countryside was prettier, things were simpler and people were happy anyway even if they did have to stay in a shed. Possibly, but also possibly not; there were just fewer consumer goods and people thought that a railway coach for 8 for a week was a form of luxury. Mind you, I’m off to stay in a mobile home on a French campsite. So perhaps holidays – and people – haven’t changed that much after all.

Modern British Collecting

posters

I’ve had Paul Rennie’s Modern British Posters: Art, Design & Communication for a few weeks now, and am guiltily aware that I haven’t given it a proper mention yet. Now there are a whole heap of real life reasons why this hasn’t happened, which I won’t go on about, but I am also aware that I’m finding it hard to come to a conclusion about it. Which is absurd, so here are a few thoughts which may or may not come to a definite answer at the end.

Tom Eckersley Seven Seas vitamins advertising vintage poster
Tom Eckersley, Seven Seas Vitamin Oil, 1947

This doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. The book is beautiful and would justify its cover price (more on that below) for the illustrations alone. You’ve seen a few on the blog already, there are plenty more littering this post. There simply isn’t another book covering these subjects in this detail and with this kind of wonderful reproduction, so it’s a great thing to have.

H A Rotholz, vintage GPO poster stamps in books
HA Rothholz, Stamps in Books, GPO, 1955

Even better, the book mentions Quad Royal which is very flattering indeed. So now it’s been immortalised in print, I’d better keep this thing going for a while, rather than just be a fly-by-night blog.

Reginald Mount, Keep Britain Tidy, 1950s

But as well as the book being a whole treasure trove of beautiful images, Paul Rennie also makes some really good points about posters and collecting, so much so that I am going to repeat them all over again here. At the start, he observes that part of the reason that no one else has written this book before him is that the world of the poster, in Britain at least, is absurdly fragmented.

For example, railway posters, motoring posters and war propaganda all form specialised archives within separate institutions. Within the context of these distinct institutions, there is no urgent requirement to integrate the various and disparate parts into a history of visual communication.

I’ve touched on this in posts before – this odd disjunction between disciplines results in quirks like the National Railway Museum not thinking about its posters in terms of designers on their website and many other odd occurrences. People who know all about railway posters might have no idea about the history of the Ministry of Information; the Imperial War Museum has no reason to care about what designers did before or after the war. As a result, Modern British Posters is therefore pretty much the first decent survey of the whole, and that can only be applauded.

Abram Games London Transport poster
Abram Games, At London’s Service, London Transport, 1947

I’m also really interested when, at the end of the book, he sets out the history of how they started collecting, and the rationale behind what they chose to buy. Partly because he started out by being fascinated by the Festival of Britain and then, in discovering more about Abram Games and the Festival symbol, found himself intrigued by a wider world of graphics and communication. I trod exactly the same path too (I still have the little Festival badge that I used to wear on my hat as a teenager); it makes me wonder how many people have followed the same thoughts, and also why the Festival exerts such a potent hold over our imaginations even now.

Abram Games British Railway Poster
Abram Games, See Britain By Train, British Railways 1951.

But he also explains why they bought what they did.

Our collecting began, back in about 1982, with an interest in modern design… In 1982, the words British and Modernism seemed like a contradiction in terms.

The direction of our collecting was formed in relation to this widespread,and misguided, perception of British resistance to modernity. Conveniently, it turned out that British items were generally of little interest to international collectors and were, accordingly, less expensive to purchase.

In a way, I wish he’d put this manifesto right at the start of the book, because it’s really important. This is partly because this is – and Paul Rennie freely acknowledges the point himself – a very partial book. Every single illustration is from their own collection and so knowing the history behind it makes a big difference to the way you might read the book as a whole. (I have been trying to work out whether there is a similar unifying idea behind our own collecting; so far I have only managed to come up with: It was cheap and we liked it).

Henrion BOAC poster
Henrion, BOAC Speedbird, 1947

The idea of the British relation to modernism itself is really interesting, and something I’d want to think about at length and probably devote a whole blog post (0r three) to. But it also informs a lot of the arguments that he’s making in the main bulk of the book, so it would have been good to know beforehand.

Now, I have to confess that between these two ideas I did get a bit lost in the middle of the book. Now this is partly I think a problem of the form – Paul Rennie is heroically attempting a complete survey not only of the history of posters in Britain, but also of the social and economic conditions which affected how they were produced. So it is, of necessity, a bit of a race through quite a lot of ideas and thoughts.

But also – and this is the bit I have been pondering for a while – Modern British Posters is at heart an academic book. It’s having a dialogue with a lot of other books, and theories of art and design, ideas about cultural production and the transmission of modernism, and that simply isn’t a conversation that I am part of any more. Academia and I gave up on each other more than twenty years ago, and since then I have been concentrating on the much simpler task of telling stories about people and things. So the fault is probably with me rather than the book, for which I can only apologise. I’d be interested to hear what anyone else thinks about this, particularly if you’re a design historian and have read it.

Telephone Less Tom Eckersley 1945
Tom Eckersley, Telephone Less, GPO, 1945

If you haven’t read it yet, and want to have an opinion, which of course you do, I am pleased to say that there is also a special Quad Royal readers’ offer (we’ve never had one of those before, get us). The book is available at a massive 40% off the list price to you our esteemed reader. To get hold of it, just email jess at blackdogonline.com, with Quad Royal Readers Offer as the subject line, and she will sort out the rest.

It’s the economy, stupid

auctions

At least that’s my theory. I can’t account for the Onslows’s sale otherwise. More posters than usual didn’t sell, or didn’t make their reserves, and very few indeed made more than their estimate. It seems that after two weeks of hearing about nothing but austerity budgets and cost-cutting across the board, everyone is now too frightened to spend money on posters.

There were a few honourable exceptions. This World War Two poster reached £420, from an original estimate of £100-150.

I don’t quite know why; plenty of other wartime posters didn’t sell that well, or at all, and it’s not even a particular design classic – I prefer the idea of the Londoner’s Land Club (which I would join in a flash if it still existed) to the actual poster itself.

A few other categories did well – Munich Olympics posters, and a smattering of French things and old things that I can’t get too excited about. This Frank Sherwin poster also went for £20 over its £600 high estimate.

But many classic railway posters weren’t as popular as they might have been. Lots of Terence Cuneos and landscape Quad Royals were passed over. As was this delightful chap, from Studio Seven.

I’d have thought him irresistable, but not even cute can sell in a recession it seems.

Mind you, I can see why there might be a shortage of buyers here. After Morphets and Bloomsbury’s big railway poster sale in New York, I imagine quite a few collectors may have spent over their annual budget already. Or they may just have auction fatigue. I’m getting quite close to it, and I’ve hardly bought anything.

There were some exceptions to the general trend though. The Shell Educational Posters all did well, almost all of them selling at their £50-70 estimates.

Which is possibly surprising, because the set on eBay which I blogged about recently, have almost entirely failed to sell for £60 each. (Should you fancy a bargain, they’re now coming round again at a more enticing £39.99 each.)

Other than that, the strange rule of the poster world was once again proven, which is that original artworks are less valuable than the mass-produced reproductions that sprang from them. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Benjamin). There were a whole set – nine in total – of Frank Newbould railway safety posters. Each one paired the poster with the artwork and one or more original design treatments.

You’d have thought it would be a museum or a collector’s dream; but none of them made their £150-200 estimate, and a few failed to sell altogether. I’d love to know where they came from.

Also of interest is that a selection of 1960s London Underground posters (like this 1963 Frank Dobson) almost entirely went for £55-60 each.

Which perhaps makes the estimates at the Morphets sale look more reasonable, a thought which quite perks me up. Perhaps I’d better go and order that truck then…

But if you fancy buying any posters in the meantime, Onslows will consider offers on any of the unsold lots, so take a look, there may be a bargain or two to be had.

Disclaimer: this is an entirely personal view and has probably missed lots of interesting prices out. Please feel free to point them out, or to suggest any other theories you may have about why auctions and prices are as they are.

Tag: railway poster

The thick of it

Coming in to land

Too many auctions

Holiday Haunts

Modern British Collecting

It’s the economy, stupid