Leslie Carr illustrates "By Road, Rail, Air and Sea" (1931)

Fourteen years have passed since I last wrote about the illustrator and poster artist, Leslie Carr and noted the lack of online biographical information. That situation has changed and a lot more detail has emerged about his life and work. We now know he died in the town of his birth, Hove, in 1969 and in his last decade was employed as Art Director for The Motor magazine. In the First World War he served in the Tank Corps and during the Second World War he was a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service. Carr painted a series of paintings of wartime subjects based on his experiences, one of which sold at auction in 2018 for £16,000 after a pre-sale estimate of £200 to £400.

Today’s images come from a Blackie picture book for children published in 1931 titled By Road, Rail, Air and Sea for which Carr supplied the cover art and the majority of illustrations. The cover is a busy dockside scene in which all four transport types are combined in a single image in which areas of unmodified colour are enclosed by crisply incisive contours. In the spirit of the time he mostly employs a sachplakat style, to which he occasionally (and sometimes incongruously) adds some vigorous cross-hatching. Drawings are considered and precise with a subtle and inventive colour palette and at their most radical (the paddle-steamer) display a near-Japanese quality of repose. Examples of his poster work can be seen at Art UK and the Science and Society Picture Library.