Post Early in Christmas Week

Lithograph by Barnett Freedman in black, red, yellow, pink and blue, signed and dated in the plate. Single sheet, 51 x 76cm. [London, Curwen Press] for the General Post Office.

Recently framed and glazed. Very good, image area bright and clean, extremities lightly creased, small closed tear to lower edge.

Freedman was one of the foremost commercial artists of the twentieth century, working on commissions for customers as varied as the London Underground and the Milk Marketing Board of Britain. This he combined seamlessly with a career as a highly accomplished book illustrator and fine artist, 'it was the seasoned bookshop-prowler who noticed him first... to the majority who know it, the name of Barnett Freedman recalls first and foremost a particularly distinguished series of book-jackets... [including] masterful editions of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Anna Karenina' (Jonathan Mayne, Barnett Freedman). Some may have seen a contradiction between church and state in his combining 'Real Farmhouse Cheese' with Tolstoy, but Freedman himself drew no distinction; when challenged he would ask 'what's commercial art?... There's only good art and bad art'. 

The Times described Freedman's career as 'a striking instance of the triumph of the ruling passion over difficulties', he overcame a childhood 'marked by outstanding ill-health, culminating in four years spent in hospital beds... Others have claimed to have educated themselves: few can have such a right to the claim as Barnett Freedman, who, with little or no organized schooling behind him, used these years of forced inactivity to learn to read, write, play music, draw and paint - all from a fixed point in a hospital ward... the astonishing tenacity of this poor, sickly boy which cannot fail to arouse the romantic imagination.' (Jonathan Mayne). 

Freedman worked primarily under Harold Curwen at the Curwen Press, and his work epitomised their motto to 'get the spirit of joy into printed things.' Much of his poster work was printed at Curwen through the process of auto-lithography, in which the artist works directly onto the lithographic stone without the aid of intermediary reproduction, and this poster for the General Post Office is likely to follow that same pattern. Only very few copies of this poster survive, and the year of issue presumably matches the date given by Barnett Freedman who signs in the plate 'Barnett Freedman 1937'. 

Stock Code: 246187