Vintage Poster Archives
Guinness Time Crab c.1950 | Vintage Guinness Poster
Guinness Time Crab c.1950 | Vintage Guinness Poster
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A naturalistically rendered orange-red crab raises both front claws to cradle a tall pint of Guinness stout, the liquid deep near-black beneath a thick straw-gold head. The composition is set against a spare cream ground with no border or decorative device: the crab and pint occupy almost the full vertical, flanked by the bold teal-green headline 'GUINNESS TIME' at top and the rounded black tagline 'Have this one with me!' at lower left.
Guinness advertising of the 1930s to 1950s was produced through the London agency S.H. Benson, with artist John Gilroy creating the celebrated 'Guinness for Strength' and zoo-animal campaigns. The crab belongs to the parallel 'Guinness Time' series. The Guinness Storehouse notes that the crab design was produced by an artist working in the tradition Gilroy established; the individual attribution is unconfirmed. The poster was printed in Great Britain by John Waddington Ltd of Leeds, a printer closely associated with Guinness issues of the mid-century period.
The flat, confident illustration, the crab rendered in warm tonal gradients of orange and burnt sienna against the pale ground, reflects the mid-century advertising convention of combining naturalistic subject rendering with near-abstract compositional simplicity. The two-colour type treatment, teal and near-black, is applied with restraint on a cream field that gives the design its open, unhurried quality.
Reproduced via the Giclée process on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper with pigment-based archival inks, on natural white stock with no optical brighteners.
