Edward McKnight Kauffer 'Flowers o' the Corn' 1920 Transport Poster

Flowers o' the Corn (1920) is one of Edward McKnight Kauffer's most celebrated early works — a flat-colour composition of poppies, cornflowers, and wheat stems rising against a deep amber ground, produced for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London and originally printed by Dangerfield at their London press.

Kauffer arrived in London from Montana in 1914, drawn initially to Europe to study painting. The outbreak of war kept him in England, where an encounter with Vorticism and the wider post-Impressionist avant-garde proved formative. Frank Pick, the Underground's Commercial Manager and later Chief Executive of London Transport, commissioned his first poster in 1915 — beginning a partnership that would last until Kauffer's return to the United States in 1940 and yield well over a hundred designs. By 1920 Kauffer was the pre-eminent artist working in British public transport design, and that year produced a remarkable group of botanical posters — Flowers o' the Corn, Flowers of the Riverside, Flowers of the Hills on the Surrey Uplands, and Bluebells, Kew Gardens — each pairing hand-lettered verse with flat, simplified colour fields in a manner that bridged the decorative tradition of Arts and Crafts with the clarity of emerging modernism.

The design technique was characteristic of Kauffer at this period: gouache worked in opaque flat planes, with hand-lettered text integrated into the composition rather than applied as a caption. The Byron verse — 'Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class / Implore the passing step, and with their dyes / Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass' — is set in Kauffer's hand-drawn lettering

Our poster presents this design as a high-quality exhibition print, reproducing the amber warmth and precise flat colour of the original lithograph. It belongs naturally alongside Flowers of the Riverside as part of Kauffer's 1920 botanical series — a body of work that stands among the most visually coherent and poetically considered of all transport commissions for the capital