London by LMS St Paul’s Cathedral poster – Norman Wilkinson – 1925

London by LMS St Paul’s Cathedral poster – Norman Wilkinson – 1925 For this London by LMS vintage railway poster, the artist Norman Wilkinson chose to capture St Paul’s Cathedral from across the River Thames. His viewpoint appears to be from the 1920s art deco Oxo Tower on the south bank of the River Thames. His magnificent painting captures the view upriver towards the Blackfriar Bridge and to St Paul’s beyond. Wilkinson’s portrayal of the City seems quite stark and industrial, emphasised by the grey colour scheme. Smoke billows out of the chimney stacks on the river’s steamboats and factories. The river around Blackfriar’s Bridge is bustling with a variety of boats and steamships with men working hard in their jobs. The famous red buses and other vehicles are in attendance crossing the busy bridge. The tower and church spire of St Mary-le-Bow church is depicted in white, as though illuminated by a divine light. The poster is, however, just like the City of London itself, dominated by the towering presence of St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral stands at 365ft, about 111 meters tall. When the construction of St Paul’s was completed in 1710, it was London’s tallest building, and remained so until 1963, some 253 years later. Standing as it does on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London only seems to emphasise its dominance of the London skyline. The world-famous cathedral is one of the most recognisable sights of London. It is visited by over two million visitors a year. Norman Wilkinson Born in Cambridge in 1878, Norman Wilkinson attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire and St Paul’s Cathedral Choir in London. Both places he would revisit later in his career as a poster artist. He began his career as a commercial artist, with his first published work appearing in The Illustrated London News in 1898, the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine. As an artist, he produced many oil and watercolour landscapes and was particularly known for his marine paintings. However, he is probably best known for his railway posters. In this field, he found his niché becoming an incredibly successful posters artist who designed for the London and North Western Railway, Southern Railway and the London Midland and Scottish Railway. Throughout his life, he was a prolific poster artist, creating hundreds of iconic railway posters, which helped to promote travel by rail during the early 20th century. Wilkinson’s poster design was unlike any poster ever seen in railway ticket offices and on platforms. Its simplicity stood out against the norm of the time.  Wilkinson was disparaging of the posters that had come before, even describing them as “an uninspired jumble of small views of resorts… with a good deal of meaningless decoration…” and “quite unintelligible at a distance.” Just as Leonetto Cappiello had rejected the art nouveau movement to develop a more modern style of his own, Wilkinson was to do the same in Britain. His first commission was for the L&NW railway in 1905. His horizontal poster design contained just six words and a painting… of a ship. Not a locomotive or train in sight. Wilkinson’s image of a small steamer crossing the Irish Channel with the words ‘To Ireland’ in the bottom right-hand corner, was a revelation. It was a simple seascape of a small steamship crossing the English Channel on a calm summer’s day. Wilkinson’s painting was set on a dark brown border with the name of the railway company London & Northwestern Railway written at the top and the words To Ireland written in the bottom right, in blue elegant handwritten letters. Compared to the posters of his peers at the time this was simplicity itself. The design was so radical the Directors of the company were not keen on using it, and the design was only used thanks to the determined efforts of the supportive General Manager Sir Frank Rea. The public loved it and it was soon followed by many more and not just by Wilkinson. The other major railway companies quickly followed suit, replicating the format, for their own posters. In fact, Wilkinson’s design format became the template for railway posters for the next thirty or forty years. His posters did an excellent job of promoting travel by rail. They are now highly prized by collectors, and his work inspired many of the artists that followed.