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On your wall
Five Schools, Built to Deepen · Underground & Railway
Poster, Oxhey Woods, London Underground
Edward McKnight Kauffer · London Underground, 1915
What it is
A 1915 London Underground travel poster by Edward McKnight Kauffer, showing the rolling landscape of Oxhey Woods lettered plainly across a lithograph printed by Waterlow & Sons of Dunstable and London.
Why it matters
1915 is the year Kauffer's Underground posters first appeared, and this sheet was made to sell the countryside at the end of the line to city riders. Against the picturesque watercolour convention around it, Kauffer flattens the scenery into planes of colour - the modernist move that would make him the Underground's defining poster designer.
What to notice
Look at how the hills are built from simplified bands of colour stacked into each other, scenery reduced to planes rather than shaded into depth.
A landscape resolved into its plainest shapes, and made to move you anyway.
Provenance
- School
- Underground & Railway Posters (Various)
- Designer
- Edward McKnight Kauffer
- Printer / house
- Waterlow & Sons Limited, Printers, Dunstable & London
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- London Underground, 1915
- Source
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum · 1963-39-13
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. 95-year rule (published 1930 or earlier). Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
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