MANDY
£850.00
Original British 20 inch x 30 inch Double Crown Poster for the 1952 Alexander Mackendrick Ealing Studios Drama MANDY, based on the novel by Hilda Lewis and starring Phyllis Calvert, Jack Hawkins, Terence Morgan, Godfrey Tearle, Mandy Miller, Marjorie Fielding and Edward Chapman.
Sandwiched between two pairs of comedies, Mandy (1952) was the only ‘serious’ work of the five films Alexander Mackendrick directed at Ealing Studios. A powerful and affecting drama about a deaf child and her parents’ attempts to come to terms with her condition, it is remarkably free of the sentimentality which might so easily have weakened its impact.
The poster art is by John Ward (1917 – 2007). John Ward was born in Hereford, where his father, Russell Stanton Ward, ran an antiques shop and restored paintings. He was educated at St Owen’s School in Hereford, and then from 1932 to 1936 at the small Hereford School of Arts and Crafts. With financial support from the Principal, Sir William Rothenstein, he won a place at the Royal College of Art in London in 1936, where he studied under Gilbert Spencer, Barnett Freedman, Percy Horton, Charles Mahoney and Alan Sorrell, winning the prize for drawing. He drew illustrations for guides to Herefordshire and North Yorkshire. Finding that a Hereford art school colleague was now art editor at Vogue, he was commissioned to draw illustrations for the magazine from 1948 to 1952.
He taught at Wimbledon School of Art, and his volume of work and income expanded as his reputation and connections grew. He exhibited at Agnew’s gallery, and at the Maas Gallery. He drew illustrations for Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959), H.E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May (1958) and An Autobiography (1969–72) and for Joyce Grenfell’s George, Don’t Do That (1977). He made illustrations for a number of large companies – BP, Shell, Whitbread – and undertook portraits of royalty, cabinet ministers, city businessmen, and celebrities – Joyce Grenfell, Sir Michael Adeane, Sir Roger Bannister, Lord Denning, Norman Parkinson and Sir Arthur Norrington.
Printed by Graphic Reproductions Ltd., London
The poster is in very good unfolded (rolled) condition with a few edge nicks.
Availability: 1 in stock
