Ernest Michael Dinkel - celebrating World Calligraphy Day 2020.
Celebrating a legacy.
Ernest Michael Dinkel (1894 – 1983) was an extraordinarily versatile artist. His work encompassed watercolour and oil painting, graphic and mural design, glass engraving and lettering. He designed a series of decorative alphabets in the 1940’s & 1950’s.
Of German descent, Ernest Michael Dinkel was born in Huddersfield and studied at the RCA. After graduating, he went to study art and architecture in Italy and France on the Owen Jones Travelling Scholarship. He researched forgotten techniques of mural decoration, of which he became teacher at the Royal College of Art in the great era of Sir William Rothenstein. From 1947 to 1959 he was Head of Design at Edinburgh College of Art.
During this time he won a wide reputation with his paintings and in the many fields of decorative design from stained glass to inn signs, and the posters commissioned by Frank Pick for London Transport, for which he is probably best known today.
© Transport for London (please contact TfL for any licensing enquiries relating to these posters)
He exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society, the New English Art Club, and at the Royal Academy from 1927 to 1976. The Tate collection holds an example of his oil painting. The V&A Museum hold an example of one of his inn signs.
Ernest Michael Dinkel is an undiscovered gem of the post war era. Though his contemporaries Bawden and Ravilious are now fully appreciated, apart from his work for London Transport, Dinkel has never achieved the recognition due to him, perhaps because much of his considerable output remains in private hands. I am collaborating with Dinkel’s granddaughter, Cosima Dinkel, to develop an international licensing program. Our aim is to increase public recognition of Dinkel’s name via licensed product and a series of exhibitions.
Contact me to discuss licensing E.M.Dinkel’s decorative alphabets.
You can order our licensed Dinkel products via my local stationery outlet, Pen to Paper, in Brighton.
© E.M.Dinkel
© E.M.Dinkel
© E.M.Dinkel
© E.M.Dinkel
