Verney Lionel Danby Danvers was born in Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal (now Portugal), in 1895 and immigrated to England with his family circa 1902. He became a commercial artist, designing posters for the London Underground, Shell and Britain’s railways, also producing manuals on commerical design and running a school teaching commercial art. Remaining an influential designer posthumously, Verney Danvers died in London, England in 1973.
Graphic designer and poster artist, Verney Lionel Danby Danvers was born in Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal (now Portugal), in 1895. His father, Alan Danvers, was an electrical engineer and manager of the Edison Gower-Bell Telephone Company in Lisbon and was knighted by the king. The Danvers family left Portugal circa 1902 and immigrated to England. At the end of 1911, aged 16, Danvers sailed from Liverpool aboard the Lusitania, arriving in New York on 5 January 1912 on his way to visit a cousin in Victoria, British Columbia. He settled in Canada and, during the First World War, served as a clerk with the Royal Canadian Garrison Artillery (London Transport Museum). By 1920, he had returned to England and was registered as living at The Hall, Boxted, Essex (National Portrait Gallery).
Danvers worked mainly in colour lithography. Early designs for the new Underground Electric Railways Company of London such as St Albans; French Row and Guildford (both 1922), present historic townscapes in a restrained palette of black and grey. In contrast, Where it is warm and bright (1924) depicts a city street at night, where figures move through dense winter fog and the only strong light comes from the red Underground sign. Later designs, such as Godstone (1926), use areas of flat colour, while the London Transport Museum identifies the influence of Surrealism in Underground; theatres (1926). In his manual Training in Commercial Art (1926), he advised that ‘Broad flat treatment is the best [...] Make your poster sunny and crisp [...] idealise your illustration. Let it create a longing to be there’ (Marshall, 2020). His British Railways poster Swanage (1955), a view of the harbour, beach and cliffs of Swanage Bay in bright colour, has been described as following this advice in an exemplary way (ibid.). Much of his output was topographical, with seaside resorts, country outings and leisure destinations as recurring subjects. Although he was born and partly brought abroad, Danvers built his career on images of English towns and cities, coastlines and country life.
Danvers ran a school of commercial art in London, the Court School of Art, which was wound up by notice in the London Gazette in 1923. Between 1922 and 1929, he designed posters for the Underground Group and London County Council Tramways, including Some places of interest (1923), Southend-on-sea (1924), Summer outings by private bus (1925) and Underground to the Speedway (1929). For Shell, he contributed to the ‘Quick Starting Pair’ campaign (1926-1932), with designs such as Greyhounds (1926), in which two racing dogs suggest the reliability and power of the company’s paired products (National Motor Museum). For the London and North Eastern Railway, he designed Norfolk Broads by LNER and LNER Scotland from King’s Cross (both c.1925), Try a fly by the L.N.E.R. (1930s) and the cover of the Camping Holidays booklet (1934). Further clients included Southern Railway, for which he designed Folkestone (1947), British Railways, the French Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway, the fashion house Bobby & Co, and several interior design companies. Training in Commercial Art was published by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons in 1926, and Danvers also wrote humorous books (Science Museum Group). Kelly’s Directory for 1937 lists him as a commercial artist at 69 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn. During the 1920s, he was photographed by Howard Coster, and five of these portrait negatives are held by the National Portrait Gallery.
Verney Lionel Danby Danvers died in Hampstead, London, in 1973. His work is held in UK public collections, including the London Transport Museum, National Motor Museum, Beaulieu (Shell Heritage Art Collection), National Railway Museum (Science Museum Group) and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Posthumously, in 1983, the London Transport Museum reissued his 1926 Theatre poster design as a postcard. In 2007, his colour lithograph St James’s Park was offered in a sale of vintage posters at Christie’s South Kensington and, in 2013, Where it is warm and bright was selected for the exhibition, Poster Art 150: London Underground’s Greatest Designs presented at the London Transport Museum. His Swanage poster informed the painter Jeremy Gardiner’s Quayside and Kiosk, Swanage Bay, Dorset (2019) and is reproduced in the 2020 catalogue of Gardiner’s coastal paintings (Marshall, 2020).
Michal Mel