railway poster Archives - Page 12 of 16

Throw a Coach Party

auctions

It’s here. The much anticipated Morphets everything-you-ever-wanted-to-own-from -the-sixties-and-seventies Malcolm Guest catalogue has arrived at The Saleroom and on their website.

Wales and Coach tours 2 vintage posters from morphets
Donald Smith, two posters for Hants and Dorset Coaches

My brain is going to take a while to absorb it all, especially in this heat – there are over a thousand lots, and with many of them multiples of between two and fifteen posters, I haven’t a clue how many posters are actually for sale. Really quite a lot I should think, and all I’ve been able to do is skim through them. So, for the moment, here are a few nice items chosen at random for your entertainment. And a few first thoughts too.

Bruce Angrave, Party Travel for 8 or more, vintage rail poster morphets sale
Bruce Angrave, Party Travel, British Railways poster

There are huge numbers of posters which I certainly have never come across at auction or illustrated before, from, the whimsical to the modern.

Longman Party Outings By Rail vintage railway poster from Morphets
Longman, Party Outings By Rail, British Railways

John Wright, Rail Rover Tickets, British Railways

And a few which seem to have fallen off the first sale, like this rather lovely bit of GWR modernism.

Ralph Mott Factories and Factory Sites, GWR

There are also a lot of coach posters in addition to the railway collection – well over three hundred.

Studio Seven, Hire a Coach

Karo/Jacques, Luxury Coach Tours; Send Your Parcels by Bus

But mostly it’s the sheer quantity of posters itself that I find overwhelming. I could – and probably will – do a whole post just about the Royston Coopers that they have, most of which I’ve never seen before.

I should also point out that, once again, the estimates are insanely low. That Royston Cooper is estimated at £50-100, as are the two Daphne Paddens below.

If even half the lots go for close to these estimates I will a) eat my hat and b) need a removal van to bring all of my purchases down from Harrogate.

It gets even madder when you start to look at the multiples.

Anyone fancy the Games, Eckersley and two Ungers above for £100 to £150? I do, but I also don’t rate my chances too highly on that.

A full appraisal will follow in due course, but it really is worth going to take a look yourself – and then please do come back and tell me what you think.

The poster in the hat

designers

Recently, Crownfolio junior and I were in the library together and found this.

Now, surely this has to be the same Andre Amstutz who was designing posters for British Rail, the GPO and others in the late 50s and 1960s. Posters like this one.

There just can’t be that many people called Andre Amstutz to start with, never mind ones who can draw such delightful people. Here’s another scan from the book, to compare and contrast.

The progression makes sense as a career path; when posters weren’t being commissioned any more, that designers went into illustrating books instead. It looks as though that’s what Fritz Wegner (see yesterday’s post) did, and it looks as though that’s what Amstutz did too. Here’s his biography from the Penguin website.

Andre Amstutz was born in Brighton. He studied art and design at Brighton School of Art and then joined an animation film company. He later began a career in advertising, becoming Art Director at an advertising agency. Since 1960 he has worked freelance, designing posters and illustrations for a wide variety of clients, and more recently has moved into publishing, primarily as an illustrator of children’ books.

Now, I think Amstutz is a very under-rated artist. This may be because he didn’t do that many posters – I can only find a handful of British Railways ones.

Along with a few for the GPO.

(He also did a Properly Packed Parcels Please one, which I’ve posted previously.)

And this BEA poster, which is the only one of his which I can track at auction anywhere. Doesn’t go for a lot, but comes up regularly.

But the ones he did do are great, so I can’t understand why he is so overlooked. Perhaps making cheerful posters doesn’t necessarily do a lot for your reputation; people see them as cheesy and a bit uncool.

But however dour and serious you are about posters, how could you resist this? It’s from 1947-ish, and is utterly wonderful.

This isn’t the best picture of it ever, I’m afraid (the colours are much crisper in real life) but ours is framed, and I’ve never ever seen it anywhere else, so I’ve had to photograph it through the glass. Apologies.

But if anyone is able to tell me anything about British Railways moving farm by train, I would genuinely like to know. Or, for that matter, if you can tell me more about Mr Amstutz himself. He deserves more recognition. And now you must excuse me, because I have a few pigs and a tractor to pack up.

Daphne Padden

designers

After posting briefly about her a while back, I’ve been trying to find out more about Daphne Padden and her very individual poster designs.

Some of my favourites are the ones she created for British coach companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

They’re almost child-like in their simplicity and delight – I’ve never seen such an unthreatening bunch of Vikings out on the rampage – but are nonetheless sophisticated pieces of design.

To my surprise, although plenty of people really love her work, I couldn’t really find anything on the web about her, so I’ve been forced into doing some proper research. Sadly, what I discovered is that I’d begun just a bit too late, as she died in September last year. I really hope she knew that people liked her earlier work so much.

But I have been able to find out a few more details about her life. Daphne Padden was born on 21st May 1927, and was the daughter of Percy Padden ARCA who was both a fine artist and a poster designer himself. Here are a couple of his designs – the bus poster is from 1921, I am guessing that the railway one is from the late twenties or early thirties, but I can’t find a date.

As for most of the rest of the story, perhaps it’s best if she tells it in her own words – quite literally. This is the information which she produced for exhibitions of her work.

She worked as a graphic designer from the mid-fifties until, I think, the mid-1970s. Here are a couple of poster designs from 1956 and 1957 respectively.

As her work evolved, she developed a very sharp and distinctive graphic style, mostly created using cut-paper collage.

Here’s one of her originals.

Unfortunately the glue hasn’t aged as well as the design.

As she mentioned above, she also did some more corporate design work. Here’s some in-store display material for M&S, in a world where sell-by dates were an exciting new invention.

But sometime in the 70s, she changed direction and became a fine artist, producing wildlife paintings on a miniature scale.

These barn owls are only 6″ x 5″ in real life, and if you want to see more, her gallery has some here.

It’s not a completely surprising departure, because there are animals in quite a few of her posters, from this cat,

to this oddball collection of travellers (I am a particular fan of the mole driver).

She didn’t do much work in the last five or six years because of ill-health, and she died on 21 September 2009.

Now I have to confess that I’ve been sitting on this information for a few weeks now, because Daphne Padden’s own archive of designs and posters has been up for auction. I’m pleased to say that we did win some, but unfortunately it’s all still in transit and so I can’t show you any of them yet. So there will be another post in due course when they arrive. I’m also hoping to be in touch with some of her friends as well, in which case I will post a more extended biography when I can.

Thanks to Lincoln Joyce Fine Art and Gumersalls Solicitors for help with information, and to Allison for the borrowing once more of her Daphne Padden Flickr set.

Name your price

posters

Shall we talk about this?

It fell out of my and Mr Crownfolio’s newspaper at the weekend; a handy pocket guide to collectables and antiques. To my surprise, they even included posters. Or really just the one.

Just in case that’s a bit too squinty for you, here it is, along with the mindboggling / dealer-worthy / under-valued price (delete according to your own opinion) they attributed to it – also online here.

Now, I know this is revisiting lots of things I have said before about the differential between dealers’ prices and the real world and so on, but really. Eight hundred pounds? My mind, this time, has been well and truly boggled.

So I went out hunting. And I genuinely couldn’t find that poster as having been sold anywhere – it doesn’t seem ever to have been auctioned.

But I did find this.

It’s a year earlier, and I think was published by British Rail rather than London Underground.

Now, I don’t think it’s as good as the later Underground poster – you can see his design evolving to give the poster more impact between the two. But is it worth ten, twenty times less? Or even eighty times less?

Because this poster was sold at a railwayana auction earlier this year for just £10. Yes, you did read that right. Folded, but VGC. My mind is now even more boggled than it was before. So much for the internet flattening out poster prices. If anyone can explain what is going on here, I’d love to know.

Horses, sorry, modernism for all

exhibitions

Crownfolio is thinking of going to France. Actually, I’ve been thinking about my holidays for some time, but now it looks as though I’m going to have to plan another trip as well, and all because of this exhibition.

It’s called Art for All, and it’s an exhibition of British transport posters at the Yale Center for British Art, which is a part of the University.

Now at first I found myself a bit surprised and bemused that Yale could be bothered to have a collection of transport posters (a bequest, apparently see below*). But then I look at something like this 1932 Newbould,

and realise that it’s not a million miles away from a Stubbs or a Gainsborough in its depiction of a very specific kind of horsey Britishness.

To be fair to them, though, the exhibition – or at least the collection of images that they’ve chosen to promote it – isn’t packed to the gills with landscapes and posh people. In fact, if anything, it’s more on the side of modernism. There’s plenty of McKnight Kauffer, and also these delightfully a-typical Newboulds from 1933 (I wonder if he got bored of fields, villages and market towns too).

The Jazz Age made incarnate by fish. You can’t beat that, can you. Or this Tom Purvis, with an unusually subtle colour-scheme.

I also like the fact that the curators don’t seem to believe that all good design evaporated after the Second World War. They’ve included this 1956 Unger,

As well as this even later – 1965 – Abram Games.

Even better, they’ve not just gone for name designers and known posters. Also included is this 1933 gem by Anna Katrina Zinkeisen.

All of these were part of the Henry S Hacker bequest to Yale. I think I rather like his taste.

So, if you are in the U.S., it would be worth quite a detour to see this lot – and more, there are over 100 in the show in total. The show runs from next week until August 15th, so you’ve got plenty of time. And if you do make it, I’d love to hear what it’s like.

If you’ve been wondering in the meantime why I’m thinking French thoughts, it’s because the exhibition transfers to the Musée de L’Imprimerie, Lyon, France: October 15, 2010–February 13, 2011. Which is slightly more accessible by Eurostar than Yale.

But if even that seems too daunting, there’s also a book – Art for All: British Posters for Transport (Yale Center for British Art). More on that when it arrives.

*Thanks to a very forgiving email from Henry Hacker himself, I now know that it isn’t a bequest, and that Henry Hacker is still very happily collecting posters. Which makes his gifts even more generous.

Up, up and away

auctions

Time, for a quick saunter round the Christies results. Which were a mixed bag; some things sold, some things didn’t. Some things sold for way over their estimate (we’ll come to those in a minute), some things for well under. This Fred Taylor, for example, went for £250, despite an estimate of £600-800. So far, so like normal.

Fred Taylor, Cambridge, from Christies vintage poster sale
Fred Taylor, Cambridge, British Railways

But the real shock – and the reason that it’s worth my saying anything at all – was this one.

Daily Herald, McKnight Kauffer, Christies vintage poster sale
McKnight Kauffer, Daily Herald

£32,450, the highest price in the sale, despite being huge. I’m gutted.

I know that sounds unreasonable, but I love this poster. Not only because it’s great (it is) but it was also one of the reasons that I started to appreciate posters in the first place.

Back in the day, it used to hang a little-used back stairwell of the V&A, which ran from the Exhibition Road entrance, past the Twentieth Century Galleries and then up into the Eighteenth Century. I used to go up and down there quite a bit, and I learned to love it. But now I’ll never own it (mind you, at 79 x 60 inches, that’s probably a bit of a blessing).

But that wasn’t the biggest shock. That has to belong to this Edward Wadsworth.

Estimated at £4,000-£6,000, it went for £18,750. Someone must have been chuffed this weekend.

Other than that, it was also good seeing the Edward Bawden and David Gentleman London Transport posters making over £1,000.

Although each lot had been made up with other posters (six more in the case of the Bawden – I wonder which they were). Before the minimum lot requirements, these would almost all have been sold separately; it’s a shame that they’re all bundled up, unseen and unvalued now.

What will be interesting is whether or not more posters pop up at the next Onslows sale at the end of the month as a result. Patrick Bogue has just posted up a teasing page of previews at the moment – so it’s hard to tell. There’s a Stan Krol UN poster that I rather like, and I will post that when some larger images are about, and anything else interesting which turns up in the catalogue.