Aubrey Hammond

Hammond was born in Folkestone, Kent, England on September 18, 1893. His father was Lindsay Hammond, son of a corn merchant and his mother was Edith Elmore, an artist.

Hammond studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Académie Julian, Paris. He taught commercial and theatrical art at the Westminster School of Art.

Hammond was involved in World War I from 1914 until his demobilisation in 1919. He served as a probationary Second Lieutenant in the 5th Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers in 1915 but achieved the rank of Brigade Major by the end of the war. He was in Dublin with the 5th Royal Dublin Fusiliers during the 1916 Easter Rising. During the war, Hammond invented a form of camouflage and illustrated military magazines. A number of his obituaries referred to him as ‘a pioneer of camouflage.’ He was attached to the camouflage section of the army shortly after the outbreak of World War II.

Hammond was noted in London social circles for his height of over 6ft 2in and his breadth. The Western Gazette described Hammond as an artist whose appearance belied his profession, “You will often see him, broad of shoulder and brawny of arm, strolling along Fleet Street, with his ‘sailor’s gait’ looking for all the world like a prize fighter – a naval welterweight.” When Hammond holidayed on the island of Brioni in the Adriatic with boxer, Gene Tunney; the press noted that the weight of Tunney and Hammond represented a “considerable displacement” for the ship they would be travelling on to deal with.

The Commercial Art Magazine published a feature article reviewing Hammond’s advertising work in 1927. The author of the feature, R.P. Gossop, asserted that Hammond’s posters ‘have those qualities of design that are bringing this country back to the position that it held in the early days of poster.’

After the war, he began work in Covent Garden as a paint room assistant. From the early 1930s Hammond was a regular scenery designer for productions at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival. In the 1934 season he designed for four of the opening eight plays performed in the first eleven weeks of the Festival. By 1935 Hammond had become the’ general scenic supervisor’ for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

Hammond illustrated books and designed book covers during his career. Many were for British authors such as Lewis Melville but perhaps his most noted book cover design was for the 1927 English translation of Thea Gabriele von Harbou's Metropolis. According to The Illustrated Dust Jacket ‘Hammond’s design for Metropolis juxtaposes delicate colour harmony with nightmarish vision’. A number of his book illustrations were of a commercial nature such as the Brighton Official Handbook and Sands Across the Sea. Hammond was a frequent contributor to The Graphic where he illustrated D.B. Wyndham Lewis’ columns along with once off caricatures dealing with events of the day.

Many of Hammond’s poster designs were related to the theatre. Hammond featured in exhibitions of advertising posters at the V&A in 1931 and 1935 and his posters for The Little Theatre were still being discussed for their impact on the viewer. Earlier, in 1927, an exhibition dedicated solely to advertising posters also featured Hammond and commentators remarked on how the “atrocities which used to adorn our hoardings are now giving place to works of art.”

When the state of British posters was compared negatively to American productions by the advertising consultant Sir Charles Higham, Hammond defended the British designers saying that “France is the only country turning out better posters than Great Britain and she is not far ahead and we will soon catch up with her.” Many of Hammond’s posters were used on the London Underground and by the London Underground Company; advertisements for resorts, holidays, cruises, theatre productions and consumable commodities by the artist were abundant throughout the transport system. In 1936 one writer remarked "Who could forget an Aubrey Hammond strip on a bus or in an underground train.”