John Hassall: britain’s Poster King
John hassall’s upbringing
John Hassall (1868-1948) was born in the small Kentish seaside town Deal, went to school in Worthing, and continued his education with regular lessons in drawing and painting at Newton Abbott College and later Neuenheim College Heidelberg (Germany). He then spent some years farming in Canada, before, at the age of 22, he returned to England intending to become “a great artist”, the “kind of artist who paints enormous pictures and gets infinitesimal prices for them.” Unfortunately, he discovered that he wasn’t quite good enough for that yet, so he first went for six months to an art school in Antwerp (where he met and married his first wife Isabel, who was destined to die young while giving birth to Hassall’s third child in 1901) and then for another six months to Paris, where he studied under the Academic painters Ferrier and Bougereau (who had also trained Hassall’s friend Dudley Hardy).
back in england
Back in England, Hassall and his wife rented a house in 88 Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill. During these early years, Hassall worked hard and apparently made a tolerable living by selling his drawings to various periodicals, such as the Graphic and Punch. He also exhibited several “serious” paintings at the Royal Academy (which in retrospect, however, seem rather dull – despite David Cuppleditch’s protests to the contrary in his amiable and sympathetic 1979 book The John Hassall Lifestyle, to which I owe the biographical details of Hassall’s life). However, he was at that time by no means an established artist, and certainly did not get “infinitesimal prices” for his work. In fact, although he would eventually become famous, he never got rich, mostly because he seems to have been, not unlike his friend Phil May, an unusually generous man, often working for free to support charities (among them the animal protection charity Our Dumb Friends’ League), and occasionally getting diddled along the way. Allegedly one MP ordered two large canvasses and never paid for them. (Times haven’t changed very much since then, have they?)
becoming the poster king
The turning point in Hassall’s career came when the printing firm of David Allen sent a circular to various artists inviting them to submit designs for commercial posters. Hassall decided to have a go at it, the company liked what he sent them, and Hassall was in business. During the next seven years he designed more than six hundred (!) posters for David Allen and other publishers, and quickly became known as the “Poster King” of Britain – which is no small feat given the poster craze of the late 1890s and the fact that virtually all of Hassall’s colleagues (such as, to name just a few, his fellow London Sketch Club members Rene Bull, Cecil Aldin, Dudley Hardy, Tom Browne, Phil May, and Lawson Wood) also dabbled in poster design. Beyond that he also illustrated literally hundreds of children’s books (one of them, Two Well-Worn Shoe Stories, in collaboration with Cecil Aldin). His first posters were for the theatre (his favourites being pantomimes), followed quickly by posters advertising products as diverse as Moonlight Soap, British Vacuum Cleaners, Danysz Virus Rat Poison, Wright’s “Eureka” Gas Cookers, or Colman’s Mustard. Occasionally he tried to make an impact on politics, and not always in a way that most of us would appreciate today, for instance when in 1912 he designed a poster for the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage showing the run-down home of a suffragette, her neglected children, and her poor but patient husband who has to put up with it all. Hassall’s poster designs were still in demand in the 1920s and 30s, but by then his style, which didn’t change much over the years, had begun to appear old-fashioned. Hassall died in 1948, rather lonely, I imagine, after all his old friends had died long before him, leaving behind his five children (among them the poet and playwright Christopher Hassall and the wood engraver and book illustrator Joan Hassall), and a rich legacy not only of his original drawings, but of all kinds of exotic collectables such as masks, costumes, and weapons.
Book recommendation: Lucinda Gosling’s John Hassall: The Life and Art of the Poster King
John hassall’s postcards
At least 420 of Hassall’s designs have been printed as postcards, the majority for Davidson Bros. (ten sets of six), Tuck (eight), and Hartmann (eight). My favourite among the non-poster designs is a set of girls’ faces beautifully framed in a gold circle, published by Alexander Baird in their Signed Series. But the posters are really Hassall’s chef d’oeuvre, the most compelling of his designs. So far I have found 128 postcards advertising products and plays, but I’m quite sure there are a good deal more.
John hassall’s style
Hassall’s style is easily recognisable, and of a cheerful simplicity. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, his work is characterised by flat, bright areas of colour framed by bold outlines, imaginativeness and humour. In an article that appeared in Pearson’s magazine in 1905, Hassall described what in his view made a successful poster: “The first (essential) is that it should catch the eye, or, to put it more strongly, it should hit the passer-by right in the eye-ball. This is best attained by a huge splash of colour, which should dominate the whole picture. (…) The second essential is simplicity, which, indeed, is a corollary of the first. (…) The third essential is that the poster should clearly indicate what it advertises.” Although he did not always observe these rules to the letter, he usually managed to create a striking image that immediately puts us at ease and into good humour. As a designer of posters, he is funny and immensely likeable, despite or perhaps because his limitations as an artist. “Hassall”, writes Bevis Hillier in his informative and highly entertaining book Posters (London 1969), “is by nobody’s standards a great artist. But he was, one might say, a hack of genius.” He was blessed with the same flow of ideas as the great artist, but he translated those ideas into his “bouncy, facetious style, and whatever subtle or sublime qualities might have been in them were sacrificed to obtain an effect of pawky humour”. Admittedly, we don’t find much of the sublime in Hassall, but what we do find in his humour is humanity and a deep appreciation of the joy of living. Interestingly, although Hillier clearly did not think much of Hassall as an artist (in the narrow, ‘high art’ sense of the word), he maintained that as advertisements his designs were superior to more refined works such as Mucha’s posters for Job cigarette papers. I take this to be a huge compliment.
