The Tate Gallery

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.