?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
E. MCKNIGHT KAUFFER (1890-1954) THE TOWER OF LONDON. 1936. 20x137/8 inches. Vincent Brook, Day & Son, London. Condition A-: pinholes, discoloration and minor creases in margins. American born Kauffer studied in Paris and arrived in London in 1914. The following year, Frank Pick, the genius behind London Underground's incredible advertising, gave the young artist his first commission. Over the next 20 years Kauffer designed 141 posters for the company. Kauffer's style could be highly modernistic, employing bold new typography, geometric designs and even photomontage. But he was also a more delicate, inspired landscape painter. In the mid 1930s he designed a series of posters depicting four London monuments: Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster from the Thames and this image for the Tower of London. To the Tower's venerable Kauffer adds contemporary typography showcasing his "excellent solution of the problem of making lettering a necessary part of the poster as a whole . . . Romantic in spirit though at the same time thoroughly masculine in character" Purvis p. 23.
