New Zealand

Fred Taylor was one of Britain's foremost poster artists from 1908 to the 1940s, best known for his posters of buildings and architecture. His clients included railway and shipping companies as well as the Underground (later London Transport) and the Empire Marketing Board. He was also a decorative painter, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy.

This work represents an amalgamation of these latter two specialties in his oeuvre. It was commissioned for the ‘Tropical Outfitters Department’ for Austin Reed’s of Regent St, a twentieth-century English clothing company with an international reputation. New Zealand was one of several murals painted to run around the top of a red lacquer room where tourists and emigrants could be dressed for their imperial ‘adventures’. Other colonies represented in the frieze of Empire include India, West Africa, Burma, New South Wales.

In this exercise, Taylor’s work offers a fascinating twentieth-century epilogue to the histories of picturing the Empire. It enables reflection on the way that depictions became distorted and refracted through reproductions and re-imaginings over time and across different media. It tells a fascinating story about the relationship between centre and periphery, and the persistence of certain narratives and beliefs well into the modern era.