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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Friday’s ad is an odd one. It’s for the Staten Island, New York brewery Rubsam & Horrmann. Founded in 1870 in in the town of Stapleton. Piels bought them out in 1953 but closed the brewery ten years later. The ad’s scene is set in Cuba, so I’m guessing the ad is from around the time of the Spanish-American War, which was in 1898. The guy in the brown hat looks like Teddy Roosevelt and the on the right the white-haired man resembles either Buffalo Bill Cody or Mark Twain. But despite the navy parked in Havana harbor, they’re all toasting with Rubsam & Horrmann beer.
CNN is reporting that the World’s ‘Oldest Beer’ Found in Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands. The Ålands are an autonomous group of nearly 6,000 islands near Finland. The cargo ship is believed to have been sailing from Denmark, most likely Copenhagen, sometime between 1800 and 1830 possibly bound for St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s also speculation that t may have been sent “by France’s King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.”
Initially, divers found bottles of Champagne, but later found additional bottles, some of which burst from the pressure upon reaching the surface, revealing that there was beer inside them. From the CNN report:
“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.
“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”
It will certainly be interesting to see what further analysis of the beer reveals.
Thursday’s ad is a second French poster with the title Bieres de la Meuse and the less well know of the two, because the other was done by the well-known artist Alphonse Mucha. It doesn’t quite have the majesty of the Mucha poster, but it’s very striking in its own right.
Wednesday’s ad is for another Swiss beer, Brauerei Zum Sternenberg, from Basel. With the tagline “Trinkt Sternenberg Bier” or drink Sternenberg beer, the artwork resembles an illustration from a children’s book. The “king” sits on a throne with brewer’s stars on each arm and there’s one behind him, too. Below the throne, a triple tap fountain spills beer into a pool. The kings seems to be shouting “drink, drink” urging on the kneeling man chugging his beer. Certainly one of the odder scenes in a beer ad.
Tuesday’s ad is for the London brand Barclay’s Lager. Getty Images claims it’s from around 1900 but the artist, Tom Purvis, was born in 1888 meaning he’d have been 12 then, so it seems more likely it was actually later. The ad reminds me a bit of the Blues Brothers movie, the scene at the bar where the bartenders tells the band they have both kinds of music, country and western. They serve both kinds of lager, “Light or Dark.”
Monday’s ad is for the Swiss brand Löwenbräu. “Trinkt Furcher Zöwenbräu” is essentially “drink Swiss Löwenbräu.” It was done by the Swiss artist Otto Baumberger. I love the look of the mug.
