Maxfield Parrish on a T-Shirt: The Antique Poster Line Nobody Remembers

Here is something the iron-on trade is not remembered for.

Somewhere in the 1970s, somebody in this business was working through a stack of pre-war commercial art and putting it onto t-shirt transfers. Not cartoons. Not rock bands. Fine art and old advertising, fifty years old at the time of printing.

We have found eight of them so far.

The eight

Maxfield Parrish, Daybreak, 1922. The best-selling art print in American history — at its peak it hung in roughly one in four American households. On a t-shirt.

An Enoch Bolles pin-up, 1936. Bolles painted magazine covers through the twenties and thirties and is now recognised as one of the defining American pin-up artists. This one came through Roach.

May’s Choice Vegetable Seeds. A turn-of-the-century seed catalogue cover. The original listing even said so — “Turn of Century Posters as iron-ons” — which is how we knew this was a deliberate line and not a coincidence.

Pennsylvania Railroad — Atlantic City, America’s All Year Resort. A railway travel poster.

New York Central System — New York to Chicago, 16 Hours! A second railway poster, different line.

The Sun — “Advertising Gives Best Results.” An old newspaper advertising poster.

An Art Deco motoring plate. Pure between-the-wars automotive elegance.

Ski Chamonix, Mont-Blanc. Straight out of the golden age of European travel-poster design.

Why this is strange

Everything else on a 1970s transfer wall was current. That was the format’s entire logic — a film opens in May and there are sheets by summer. The wall ran on immediacy.

And then, alongside Farrah Fawcett and the Bee Gees, somebody hung a 1922 Parrish and a Victorian seed catalogue.

Two railway posters is the detail that settles it. One might be an accident of taste. Two, from different railroads, alongside a newspaper ad and a seed catalogue, is a programme. Someone was sourcing from a body of pre-war print and converting it systematically.

What we still don’t know

We can’t yet tell you which house printed the antique line, whether it was one person’s enthusiasm or a catalogue category with a name, or whether it sold at all. Only the Bolles carries a Roach attribution.

Somebody knows. There are people alive who repped this stuff, and to them it was just a page in a sample book.

If you remember an antique or fine-art range in a transfer catalogue — or you own one we haven’t found — write to irononstation@gmail.com.

Fifty years on, a Parrish on a t-shirt reads as a small act of curation by somebody who probably thought of themselves as being in the printing business.

See the Parrish sheet · Read the full archive account