Percy Trompf

Percy Trompf (c.1930s) For a Different Holiday, Great Barrier Reef, Colour lithograph

Trompf was born on 30 May 1902 in Beaufort, Victoria, the ninth child of Henry Alexander Trompf, a fruiterer, and his wife Catherine Amelia,[2] née Elliott.[3] His family later moved to Ballarat, and he was educated at Sebastopol Primary School. He developed an enduring interest in cricket and sang and competed as a member of a church choir.[4] He became one of the earliest students at the Ballarat School of Mines' Ballarat Technical Art School where he left with his certificate in 1917,[5][6][3][7] and where he was remembered in 1930, when his posters were exhibited there, as "one of Ballarat's most notable old boys".[8]

In 1923,[9] Trompf began designing confectionery boxes and wrappings for Giles & Richards, a Melbourne firm of commercial artists,[3] before setting up his own studio in Little Collins Street, painting and designing thousands of advertising posters, usually of 25 x 40 inches (64 x 102 cm) format, and 24-sheet advertising hoardings, for which Trompf supervised all stages of production, including the lithographic printing.[10] He also designed books and pamphlets throughout his career.

An early client was Charles Holmes (later editor of Walkabout, also a client) chairman of the Victorian Railways Betterment and Publicity Board under Harold Clapp.[3][11] Holmes had recognising the successful use of poster advertising by the London Underground's Frank Pick, and hired Trompf for a similar campaign in the 1920s.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]

By 1931, Trompf was well known as a poster artist.[19] "Scuu" in Smith's Weekly of August 8, 1931, rhetorically asked;

"Does commercial art pay? Well, ask Percy Trompf, who has just had another striking 'Eat More Oranges' poster accepted by Harold Clapp to brighten Victorian railway stations. So many of Percy’s posters are already on railway hoardings that many people believe he is on the permanent payroll. The A.N.T.A. have also adopted his designs—notably the Landing of Captain Cook and the Sydney Harbour Bridge—while the Orient S.S. Co. has just awarded him first prize in the competition to improve its posters"[20]

Clients included the Canadian Pacific Railway,[21] Bryant & May, Palmolive, and the magazine Walkabout established March 25, 1929 by its parent body the Australian National Travel Association.[22] For the latter Trompf produced posters targeted at a limited number overseas who could afford travel, and their designs and content reflect this niche market.[23] By 1930, 100,000 posters had been distributed.[24]

In May 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and was commissioned as a pilot in June.[3] Trompf served mostly at Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, and worked as a camouflage officer.[3] He was demobilized in February 1948, with the rank of flying officer.[3]

Trompf, Percival Albert (1933), The Marine Wonders of the Great Barrier Coral Reef. Colour Lithograph

Returning to business after the war, Trompf received little work from A.N.T.A and the Victorian Railways. His clientele reduced during the 1950s to the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau,[25] the Commonwealth Railways, and Victorian Education Department for road safety posters. He produced also some book covers, illustration and design, including Under southern skies, on the Dandenong Ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Gippsland for the Australian Publicity Council.[26][27]

Poster design declined in the 1960s as magazines and travel institutions increasingly used more affordable colour photography rather than specially commissioning graphic illustrations, for the sake of faster turn-around and for more persuasive realism.[28]

Trompf enjoyed a growing reputation alongside other poster artists James Northfield, Walter Jardine, Eileen Mayo, Gert Sellheim and C. Dudley Wood. In their 1940 report on the first annual show of the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists’ Association in Sydney, The Bulletin characterised him as "one of the few poster men whose signature is well known."[19] In 1985, surveying Australian representations of beach culture, historian Geoffrey Dutton equates Trompf to Max Dupain, Charles Conder and Sydney Nolan.[29]

The colour lithography that Trompf used produced bold, simplified realism in an Art Deco style,[30][31] with wide appeal, especially during the Great Depression. Posters exhorted Australians to travel by rail, to eat more fruit to the benefit of the country's struggling primary producers and, against competition from cars and buses contributing to unsustainable rail service deficits, they sought to promote diversity of purposes for travel that might provide new sources of revenue.[32] They promoted the simple joys of sun-worship,[25] surfing[33] and bushwalking,[34] which were then becoming popular alongside a general interest in 'body culture' then pervasive among the young,[35] famously celebrated in Trompf's best-known poster simply titled Australia.[36]

In recent evaluations, Gilfedder, in analysing, as a sample, the visual rhetoric of Trompf's poster for the British market featuring Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay to invite the traveler to 'Discover Australia', concludes that such travel posters were early instances of 'country branding'.[37] Symes perceives that railway posters of this period using state-of-the-art techniques of the new field of commercial art developed Victoria's tourist geography, locating, labelling, visualising and imbuing places and regions with specific recreational and leisure attributes[38] and Pocock attributes such responsibility, on a whole-of-Australia scale, to Trompf's 1933 poster [39] in advancing the Great Barrier Reef as one of the most significant tourist destinations.[24] Dann[40] and Barnes[41] show how tourism marketing professionals including Trompf created a visual language of modernity, promotion and consumerism.[42]

Barnes cites Trompf's Commonwealth Railway poster as applying an American aesthetic in depicting Central Australia; replacing North American pueblos with Australian indigenous ‘Arunta' men. Juxtaposing modern, white, explorers-cum-tourists with 'primitive natives’ each in formulaic groupings, positions and postures, the colonial figures and their vehicles are given centre- and stage-right to symbolise progress, while Aboriginal men are diminished in scale and backgrounded to represent their servility and symbolic position in the past.[43][44]

The nostalgic attractiveness and historical interest of Trompf's posters endure; they are frequently included in public exhibitions,[45] they have become collectible national treasures[46][35] and they fetch up to $A12,000 at auction.[47][48]

On 14 May 1932, Trompf married Vera Johns at the Methodist Church, Armadale, Victoria, Melbourne, and they had two daughters.[3] His nephew (b.1940) was religious historian Professor Garry W. Trompf.[49][50]

Trompf died of a renal infection on 17 July 1964 in Heidelberg, Melbourne.[3]

• 2017, July 14 - October 15; Brave new world, National Gallery of Victoria
• 2012/13, December 12 - July 7; Treasures Gallery, National Library of Australia, 12 December 2012 - 7 July 2013
• 2008, March 5 - June 15; Bridging the Distance, National Library of Australia[52]
• 2007/8, December 13 - February 17; Pioneers of the Inland: Australia's Muslim Cameleers 1860s - 1930s, National Library of Australia
• 2003/04, 22 October - March; Tourism in Australia: an exhibition of material from the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University[53][28]
• 2001, August 10 - October 22; All the rage: the poster in Victoria 1850-2000, Keith Murdoch Gallery, State Library of Victoria
• 1999/2000, November - March; Follow the Sun, National Library of Australia

• Art Gallery of New South Wales[54]
• National Gallery of Australia[55]
• National Library of Australia[56][57]
• National Museum of Australia[58]
• Australian National Maritime Museum[59]

• 1929: winner, Orient Company's first prize of £30 for a design in the annual industrial poster competition organised by the Royal Society of Arts[60]
• 1934: Ideal Label Contest
• 1946: First prize (£100) in the Blue Mountains Council's nation-wide competition