Verney Lionel Danby Danvers (14 June 1895 – 1 December 1973) was a British graphic designer and commercial artist, best known for the design of posters for London Transport,[1] Shell-Mex & BP,[2] and railway companies such as the London & North Eastern Railway, Southern Railway and British Railways.[3]
Danvers was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1895 where his father was an electrical engineer working as an agent for the Edison Gower-Bell Company. The family left Portugal for England in 1902. Danvers studied at Hornsey College of Art in 1911. By 1920, he had become a commercial artist by then producing posters for a variety of railway and tram companies and for others, such as Shell and the fashion house Bobby & Co. His book Training in Commercial Art was published by Pitmans in 1928. Danvers ran The Court School of Art for a while but this was wound up, by notice in the London Gazette in 1923.[4]
Danvers died in 1973 in Hampstead, north London, aged 78.
Copies of his work are held by the London Transport Museum,[5] the Art Institute of Chicago,[6] the Museum of Modern Art,[7] and the Library of Congress.[8]