Aldo Cosomati was born in Milan, Italy, in 1895, the son of the Italian painter and etcher Ettore Cosomati and Ida (née Forcellini). Cosomati spent five years in Zurich, Switzerland studying drawing, printing, bookbinding, and furniture design, and also undertook studies in Germany. He immigrated to England at the end of the First World War, settling in London, where he established himself as a commercial artist designing posters and, from 1922 to 1928, was among the artists commissioned by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) to produce iconic images for the London transport network. Aldo Cosomati died in Hertford, England. on 26 November 1977.
Commercial artist, illustrator, and poster designer, Aldo Cosomati was born in Milan, Italy, in 1895, the son of the Italian painter and etcher Ettore Cosomati and Ida (née Forcellini) and brother to Mario. He married the sculptor Eileen Hammersley-Heenan, and they had one daughter, Alda Maria. Before arriving in England, he spent five years in Zurich, Switzerland studying drawing, printing, bookbinding, and furniture design, and also undertook studies in Germany. This broad grounding in applied and decorative arts proved formative, equipping him with both the technical skills and the cross-disciplinary outlook that would define his career. At the end of the First World War, Cosomati immigrated to England. In 1921 he had already designed the poster for his father's exhibition of paintings at the Small Aeolian Hall, and he continued to work as a commercial artist in the capital for several decades thereafter.
Cosomati's practice was rooted in the traditions of the decorative arts, and his work exhibits a confident command of colour and simplified form, well suited to the demands of large-format commercial poster design. Working primarily in colour lithography and silkscreen, he developed a bold illustrative approach in keeping with the Art Deco aesthetic that characterised much of the graphic output commissioned by British transport bodies during the interwar period, deploying flat planes of vivid colour and clearly readable silhouettes to communicate destinations and journeys with immediacy and appeal. As an Italian-born artist working in Britain, Cosomati brought an observational precision that was simultaneously appreciative and slightly external to familiar London scenes and British customs. This quality of vision distinguished his contribution to the commercial arts of the period. From 1922 to 1928, Cosomati was among the artists commissioned by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) to produce pictorial posters for the London transport network. Cosomati produced a sustained series of posters promoting tram and underground services across the capital. Among his most notable works from this period are Hampton Court by Tram (1923), Trooping the Colour (1923), Edgware by Tram (1923), International Horse Show, Olympia (1923), Reconstruction of City and South London Railway (1924), and The Most Settled Way about London (1928). In 1925, Cosomati co-organised, with his father, the English section of the II Biennale di Monza.
Alongside his poster work, he maintained a career as a book illustrator: a review in the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art in 1926 praised his drawings for An Arcadian Calendar by Marcus Woodward (London: Bles, 1926), noting that he 'catches the Arcadian spirit in all his drawings.' He was also introduced to Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press by Richard Temple and continued to work for the Press until 1970, connecting him to one of the most distinguished printing establishments in twentieth-century Britain. From the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Cosomati extended his commercial practice to the aviation sector, producing a substantial body of poster work for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). These silkscreen travel posters promoted BOAC routes to many destinations, including Canada, Australia, Pakistan, and Italy, as well as Caribbean destinations served by British West Indies Airways (BWIA), a BOAC subsidiary. In contrast to the domestic register of the London Transport posters, the BOAC commissions required Cosomati to give visual form to a wide range of international cultures and landscapes, demonstrating the continued adaptability of his illustrative approach across the postwar era's expanding market for air travel.
Aldo Cosomati died on 26 November 1977 in Hertford, England. His works are held in public collections in the UK, including the London Transport Museum, London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as well as in the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Posthumously, his work was included in the group exhibition, Everyone's Art Gallery: Posters of the London Underground, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, in which Cosomati appeared alongside prominent British poster artists, including Paul Nash and Edward Bawden. His work also featured in Art Deco: The Golden Age of Poster Design at the London Transport Museum, London, which opened in November 2025. Cosomati's contribution to British commercial art, though largely uncredited during his lifetime given the conventions of the industry, is now recognised through the presence of his work in major institutional collections.The Ben Uri Research Unit welcomes contributions from researchers or family members who may have further biographical information.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Aldo Cosomati ]
Publications related to [Aldo Cosomati ] in the Ben Uri Library