Empire Builders
Designer
Fred Taylor
United Kingdom, 1875 - 1962
Date1927
MediumColor Lithograph
Dimensions19 1/4 x 29 1/4 in. (48.9 x 74.3 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LineGift of Judith Selkowitz
Object numberPH.9237
DescriptionThis poster was one of many commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), established in 1926 both to encourage the British public to purchase foodstuffs and industrial products from the British Empire and to reinforce the nation’s economic relationships with its imperial territories. Stephen Tallents, the secretary of the EMB, launched a nationwide poster campaign to this end, and asked Frank Pick, who had been responsible for the visionary design program of the London Underground, to chair the Publicity Committee. They hired well-known artists like Clive Gardiner, E. McKnight Kauffer, and Frank Newbould to design giant, eye-catching posters intended to be displayed in distinctive wooden frames on public hoardings. Like these artists, Fred Taylor, one of Britain's foremost poster artists between 1908 and the 1940s, had also produced designs for London Transport as well as for the London Underground and various railways and shipping companies. (He also became an official camouflage artist during World War II.) This poster showing a busy dockyard scene with goods being loaded onto and off a ship, is one of the posters in his series Empire Builders; Taylor’s command of the color and detail in this large composition relates to his other work as a decorative painter. Like many of the posters in the EMB’s campaigns, this one was later printed in a smaller version for regular distribution to schools in order to communicate the economic importance of the empire. By 1933, when the EMB closed, there were twenty-seven thousand schools on its waiting list for these smaller variants. On View
Not on view
