Art Exhibition Posters.  A Buyers Guide Regular readers of my blog will know by now how much I love vintage posters, especially British travel and propaganda designs. But there’s one type of poster that I’ve become more and more interested in over the last couple of years: original art exhibition...

If, like me, you dream of finding a hoard of railway posters languishing forgotten in a disused attic, the following blog post may prove too much to bear. For that is exactly what happened earlier this year when a lady contacted me out of the blue to say that she...

A fashion-conscious visitor to the Swinging London of the late 1960s could hardly have missed the achingly cool ad campaigns for leading women’s shoe retailer T. Elliot & Sons. From giant billboards to ‘car cards’ in Tube trains, trendy graphics and innovative product photography helped establish the brand as the...

The annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House, London, is a British institution. First held in 1769, the exhibition has taken place every year since without exception. The eclectic mix of paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, architectural designs and models continues to draw huge crowds during...

Salford to London   Tom Eckersley (top) and Eric Lombers  In 1934 two aspiring Lancashire designers arrived in London at the start of a creative partnership that was to help transform commercial art in Britain. Tom Eckersley (1914-1997) and George Eric Lombers (1914-1978) had studied together at Salford Art School...

In the years after the Second World War commercial art in Britain was booming. A new generation of designers and illustrators brought a cheery, optimistic, aesthetic to advertising that saw its greatest expression in the posters and publicity of progressive commissioners, such as the General Post Office (GPO), London Transport...

Its amazing what you can find when you're looking for something else. Last summer I was in New York searching for vintage posters, when a dealer showed me three original commercial artworks by poster legend Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890 – 1954). Executed in gouache paint, and signed/dated on the front and...

The unprecedented expansion of London’s suburban hinterland in the 1920s and 30s required a new type of publicity to sell the homes and lifestyles on offer. In London Transport Posters. A Century of Art & Design (2008), I wrote about the methods used by London Underground to market the emerging...