From a Golden Age

I'm passing this on - with grateful tips of the hat to Jonathan Law and Ian Beck - simply because it's a cheering story, with some rather beautiful images. How wonderful - and how characteristic of the period - that Lyons should respond to a postwar shortage of decorating materials by commissioning a series of fine art lithographs to brighten up their Corner Houses. It put me in mind of another artistic initiative from the same period - the School Prints - which I wrote about a while ago. With initiatives like these and the brilliant poster work being done for London Transport and the train companies (and businesses like Shell), this postwar period - and indeed the whole period from the Thirties through to the early Sixties - was surely a golden age of graphic art. The pictorial environment of this country was never richer - was it?
[The image above is Fishing at Marlow by Edwin la Dell.]