'The Park Keeper, Custodian of Our Open Spaces'. Oil painting by Elijah Albert Cox, the design for a poster in the series 'London Characters' issued by the Underground Electric Railways Co. of London Ltd., 1920.

Portrait of a park keeper seated on a grassy mound in open countryside, with a clear sky above, his head turned to the viewer. He is wearing a long brown-coloured suit jacket and bowler-shaped hat and holds a walking stick in his left hand.

This is the original design for a poster in the series 'London Characters' issued by the Underground Electric Railways Co. of London Ltd. Printed by The Avenue Press, Lupcott, Gill & Son, 24 July 1920.

Historical significance: Elijah Cox (1876-1955) studied art at Whitechapel People's Palace and at Bolt Court Technical School (later the London College of Printing, now the London College of Communication). He became a mural painter, poster artist and illustrator, producing posters for railway and shipping companies and for the Empire Marketing Board.

In 1920 Cox was commissioned to produce a series of posters for the Underground Electric Railway Company on the theme of 'London Characters'. This is his original design for the poster 'The Park Keeper - Custodian of Our Open Spaces'. Other characters in the series include the conductor ('at your service always'), the waterman, the zoo keeper, the coster, the Billingsgate fish-porter, the Covent Garden porter, the race goer, the flower woman, the news boy and the yokel ('our country routes serve you as well as him'). A collection of these posters and many of Cox's original designs for them are in the London Transport Museum.

It was relatively unusual for poster designs to be in the medium of oil paint; watercolour, pen and ink or gouache were generally used for this purpose because of the clean, graphic effect which they produced when reproduced. As a result of Cox's unusual choice of medium, the bold painterly effect of these posters, when reproduced as colour lithographs, is striking.

This painting, along with a copy of the poster for which it is a design (E.87-1970), was transferred to the V&A from the Bethnal Green Museum in 1970.

The resulting poster was issued by the Underground Electric Railways Co. of London, Ltd. in 1920.

E.86-1970