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The Tate Gallery

Rex Whistler1928

London Transport Museum

London Transport Museum
United Kingdom

This poster, advertising London's Tate Gallery, was published by the Underground Electric Railways Company in 1928. The painting is by Rex Whistler, who had completed a mural, 'Epicurania' for the Tate Gallery restaurant earlier that year. For the poster, Whistler took distinctive elements from the mural and wove them into a new composition. His 18th-century pastiche includes two women taking tea. They have been added to the foreground to appear as though they are in the Tate restaurant itself. The poster also includes a caricatured image of a black child looking down on the scene below from the branches of a tree. Today such depictions are shocking and unacceptable, but in 1920s Britain, such caricatures were commonplace, even being used for the promotion of a brand of marmalade.

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