Dorothy Dix, The Hop Gardens of Kent by Motor-Bus, 1922

Dorothy Dix was a landscape painter who designed posters for the Underground Group in 1922 and exhibited at the Royal Academy. The Group issued posters like this for the London General Omnibus Company, to encourage Londoners out into the country by motor-bus. Copies of this design are held by the London Transport Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Two oast houses with tall red roofs and white cowls rise against a yellow sky. Trees with violet trunks screen the kilns, and the furrowed field below is striped in red and lilac. The colour is flat and bold. The lettering reads ‘The Hop Gardens of Kent by Motor-Bus’ above the General bar-and-circle symbol.

Colour lithograph, signed in the design ‘Dorothy Dix’. The margins carry the printer’s line ‘Waterlow & Sons Ltd, Lith, London, Dunstable & Watford’, the publisher’s address at Electric Railway House, Broadway, Westminster, and the code ‘(169-1000-28.3.22)’, which appears to record an order of 1,000 copies dated 28 March 1922. The museum copies are double royal, about 102 x 64 cm. This frame measures 82 x 54 cm, so the sheet is smaller than the recorded format. It may be a smaller printing, but we have not found one recorded. In a green-painted frame with a gilt slip. Paint loss and scuffs to the lower edge of the frame, and a small white mark on the black field beside the symbol.