The Beggarstaffs Prints
1894–1899 · British · Modern poster
Wall art by The Beggarstaffs, restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte fine-art paper.
4 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About The Beggarstaffs
The Beggarstaffs were the brothers-in-law William Nicholson (1872–1949) and James Pryde (1866–1941), who took the name from a sack of corn in a stable near their shared house at Denham and designed posters together from 1894 to 1899. They worked by cutting figures from coloured paper and pasting them down, so that a man or a horse became a few flat shapes on a plain ground with no outline and no modelling, and the lettering was cut in the same way. Their designs for Hamlet and Don Quixote at the Lyceum, for the farce A Trip to Chinatown, for Kassama corn flour, Rowntree's cocoa and Harper's magazine were admired across Europe, reproduced in Les Maîtres de l'Affiche and collected by the poster societies, but most were never printed as posters: clients found them too stark, and the partnership made little money. They separated in 1899. Nicholson went on to his woodcut alphabets and almanacs and a long career as a painter; Pryde painted brooding architectural scenes. Both died well over seventy years ago, Pryde in 1941 and Nicholson in 1949.