Our 34th Guinness poster by John Gilroy features an auto mechanic not needing a jack at all, instead lifting the car off the ground with one hand to work underneath it, thanks to the “Guinness for Strength” he just enjoyed.
Beer In Ads #192: Lowenbrau Zurich
Friday’s ad is a striking ad for the Swiss Lowenbrau in Zurich. There’s not much to say about it, it pretty much speaks for itself. It’s simple, only two colors; the red lion, holding and wrapped in the black flag. Timeless.
Beer In Ads #191: Birra Italia Milano
Thursday’s ad is a beautiful one for an Birra Italia, a Milan brewery. It’s from 1906 and was created by the German artist Adolfo Hohenstein, who was well-known for his Opera posters. Oddly enough, he’s “considered the father of Italian poster art and an exponent of the Stile Liberty, the Italian Art Nouveau.”
A Conversation With Fritz Maytag
Reason TV, the video arm of Reason magazine (who’ve I’ve written for), was created through a grant from Drew Carey. They’ve done a number of short online videos on a variety of subjects, and have their own YouTube channel. They even did one based on, or perhaps inspired by, the article I did for them a few years ago, entitled Beer: An American Revolution. More recently, they did an interesting 10-minute interview with Fritz Maytag, the godfather of the craft beer movement in America. If you’ve heard Maytag speak before or have been around him any length of time, there’s nothing new in the interview, but with him moving into the role of Emeritus as new owners take over the day-to-day operations, it’s great to have a video record of some of Fritz’s stories.
Beer In Ads #190: Tennent’s We’ll Hold It
Wednesday’s ad is for the Scottish lager Tennent’s. Given the bottle, I’m guessing this is an old ad, maybe late 19th century. With the two dogs, the tagline “Give us your business & we’ll hold it” is pretty funny.
Beer In Ads #189: Cerveza Tecate
Tuesday’s ad is for the Mexican beer Tecate, brewed by Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery. The brewery was founded in 1890. I have no idea when the ad is from, though it has a look of the 1950s or early 60s. Norman Rockwell south of the border.
Beer In Ads #188: Brasserie Flad
Monday’s ad is from a French brewery in the medieval village of Albi, the capital of Tarn, a tourist area in southern France. Founded in 1822, I assume that’s King Gambrinus holding the bottle with his picture on it. I also imagine those are supposed to be hops in the foreground, but they look more like strawberries.
Beer In Ads Special Edition: John Ireland’s The Gentle Art of Making Guinness
In honor of labor day, here’s a fun series of illustrations showing all the labor necessary to make beer, in this case Guinness. In 1981, Guinness commissioned British illustrator and artist John Ireland to create twelve paintings whimsically depicting the steps that go into making Guinness beer for a calendar.
From the Guinness Collector’s Club website:
John was born on the 19th March 1949 at Aldershot Hants and attended Farnham Grammar school, Farnham Art School and finally Ravensbourne College of Art and Design. He lived and worked in London from 1971 until moving to Norfolk in 1976. John has two sons, two sheep, a dog and a wife Tessa and has worked as a freelance illustrator since leaving college, principally for magazines and publishing, with a little bit of advertising. In recent years. A lot of his work has involved caricatures including collections of sporting personalities and a weekly drawing for the TV Times for over nine years.
John [Ireland] writes:
“I had been asked a few years prior to 1980 to submit ideas for a Guinness Calendar but nothing came of it, and when I was asked to produce roughs for a W. Heath Robinson pastiche I was initially reluctant, suggesting I could do something in my own style. When it became obvious that they – J.Walter Thompson the advertising agency — were set on doing it their way, I decided that it was better I should do it rather than someone else mess it up and do Heath Robinson a disservice.”
“There were similarities in our styles, which is presumably why I had been asked in the first place. I had been interested in his drawings since I was a child, having bought his books at jumble sales. The whole job went amazingly smoothly and following a guided tour of the Park Royal Brewery, it was left up to me to decide on which elements of production I should highlight.”
“This is so unusual for advertising, normally you are presented with layouts that you have to stick to rigidly and all the copy has been written already. In this instance I even wrote the captions. My initial roughs were accepted with hardly any changes suggested. I only had to make the May drawing a little busier and ensure that wherever possible both bottled and keg beer should be depicted as apparently there was intense rivalry between the two divisions of the company. The barman in the December drawing is actually a portrait of Heath Robinson with his cat ‘Saturday Morning’ and the customer is my Father.”
Blogger Phil Beard, at his Notes on the Visual Arts and Popular Culture, also has a nice post on the series. These days John Ireland is best known for his caricatures.
John Ireland’s The Gentle Art of Making Guinness
January: Hop Picking Time in the Guinness Fields
February: Early Morning on the Guinness Farm
March: Industry in the Guinness Maltings
April: Roasting the Guinness Barley
May: Mixing the Guinness Mash
June: Filtering the Guinness Wort
July: Fermenting the Guinness
August: Bottling the Guinness
September: Signing the Day’s Production of Guinness
October: The Training of the Guinness Quality Testers
November: Delivering the Guinness
December: The First Guinness of the Day
Beer In Art #92: Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Hangover
Today’s painting is by one of the most famous post-impressionist artists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painting is most often called “The Hangover,” though occasionally subtitled “Portrait of Suzanne Valadon,” an artist on her own right. It’s also been called “The Drinker.” The original hangs in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. It was painted in 1888.
And yes, I realize it may very well be wine in the glass and the bottle, but I’m holding out hope that it may also be beer because I like the painting so much. Toulouse-Lautrec was an alcoholic most of his adult life, and originally had a taste for beer and wine, though he later began drinking American-style cocktails, too. He had a hard time coping with people’s cruel tendency to mock his short stature and turned to drink as a result.
Art and alcohol were his only mistresses, and they were mistresses to which he devoted all of his time and energy. He was doing one or both almost every day of his life until he died.
For more about Toulouse-Lautrec, Wikipedia is a good place to start, and there are a number of links at the ArtCyclopedia and the Artchive. And you can also see a number of his other works at Olga’s Gallery, the Artliste, the Web Museum and CFGA.
Guinness Ad #33: The Thieving Polar Bear
Our 33rd Guinness poster by John Gilroy a “My Goodness, My Guinness” ad, with a polar bear having stolen the zookeeper’s bottle of Guinness.
