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On your wall
Five Schools, Built to Deepen · Underground & Railway
Poster, Winter Sales, for London Underground
Edward McKnight Kauffer · London Underground, 1922
What it is
A 1922 lithographed travel poster designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer for the London Underground, printed by Vincent Brooks Day & Son Ltd. of London W.C.2. It sells a simple errand: the winter sales are best reached by the Underground.
Why it matters
Kauffer was among the American-born designers who made the Underground a laboratory for modern advertising, and by 1922 his work for it had committed to abstraction over illustration. Here a crowd of shoppers becomes a rhythm of flat silhouettes rather than a scene, an argument that a poster read from a moving platform should hit as a shape, not a picture. It survives in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as accession 1963-39-22.
What to notice
Look at the women's dresses caught mid-gust, their edges cut into flat blue, black and orange with no shading to soften the wind.
A cold errand, redrawn as motion.
Provenance
- School
- Underground & Railway Posters (Various)
- Designer
- Edward McKnight Kauffer
- Printer / house
- Vincent Brooks Day & Son Ltd. Lith., London W.C.2
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- London Underground, 1922
- Source
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum · 1963-39-22
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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