Guinness Toucan Bottle Cap Metal Sign

Make your home bar special by adding a touch of one of the most loved beers in the world, Guinness. This bottle cap shaped metal sign will enhance your home bar walls with the iconic Gilroy designed artwork.

GILROY ANIMALS

Toucan/Pelican: 1935 The toucan (which actually started out as a pelican) was the first of the ‘Guinness Menagerie’ to appear in poster form. The theme of the ad was "Guinness -a- day", and it showed a pelican with seven pints of GUINNESS® balanced on its beak. It carried the rhyme: “A Wonderful bird is the Pelican, Its bill can hold more than its belly can, It can hold in its beak, Enough for a Week, I simply don't know how the hell he can” This became altered by Dorothy L. Sayers who changed the bird (to a toucan) and the number of glasses of beer (to two) so that the actual ad which appeared was as follows: “If he can say as you can, Guinness is Good for You, How grand to be a Toucan, Just think what Toucan do”.

JOHN GILROY

John Gilroy, (1898-1985) was one of the 20th century's most versatile, gifted and imaginative artists. He is best known for producing some of the most memorable and attractive images in British advertising, but was also a respected and successful landscape and portrait painter of royalty and celebrities. After producing several successful poster designs, Gilroy was recruited in 1925 by the advertising agency S.H.Benson's who handled the accounts of many well-known national brands including Wills Gold Flake, Coleman's mustard, Macleans toothpaste and Bovril. In 1928 Benson's began work on the first advertising campaign for GUINNESS® beer and from then until the early 1960s Gilroy was above all associated with advertising GUINNESS®. Gilroy is particularly associated with two campaigns for GUINNESS®, which ran simultaneously for nearly thirty years from the 1930s. The first involved the slogan "Guinness for strength" showing people performing incredible feats of strength empowered by GUINNESS®. The most popular posters in this series were the "Girder"(1934) depicting a workman effortlessly carrying a massive girder on his head and the horse and cart with the farmer pulling the cart (1949). The second campaign, featured zoo-animals. At the time Benson's had been trying unsuccessfully to develop a human "Guinness family" for its advertising. The idea of using animals to advertise GUINNESS® occurred to Gilroy after visiting the circus. While watching a performing sea-lion he entertained the curious thought that the animal would be smart enough to balance a glass of GUINNESS® on its nose! It became the concept for one of the world's longest running advertising campaigns "My Goodness, MY GUINNESS”. The hapless zookeeper, a caricature of Gilroy himself, watched over the family of animals which included an ostrich swallowing a GUINNESS®, glass and all, a pelican with a beak full of bottles, a tortoise, a lion, bear, crocodile, kangaroo, giraffe, polar bear, gnu, kinkajou, penguin (particularly associated with Draught GUINNESS® to emphasise its coolness) and, of course, most famous of all, the toucan. All of the zoo animals appeared together for the first time in 1953 with a poster designed to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. In the 1930s Guinness "adopted" the characters from Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books and Gilroy illustrated several parodies of the Mad Hatter's tea party, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, etc. These were used as Underground posters, as magazine ads and in a series of illustrated booklets of nonsense rhymes Guinness sent out to its friends in the medical profession each Christmas (hence their name "doctors' books"). During the Second World War Gilroy continued working on advertisements for GUINNESS®. Posters depicted a sealion offering a GUINNESS® to a zookeeper in battledress and a sailor escaping with his comrade's GUINNESS® aboard a torpedo. Due to the paper shortage, some posters were printed on the back of existing ones - this is why a Gilroy kangaroo poster in 1943 had a very dark background. The last major Gilroy poster was 1961 showing the animals at the seaside. Besides various different sized posters, they had graced hundreds of press ads and advertising miscellanea including ceramic models and table lamps in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Mid 1950s cinema commercials involved puppet animations of Gilroy's posters while the earliest television commercials for GUINNESS® used live or cartoon versions in the same way. Besides advertising Gilroy also produced for Guinness some of the early covers of the Guinness company magazine, painted a series of pictures of brewery scenes and portraits of members of the Guinness family. Gilroy actually described himself as a portrait painter, rather than a commercial artist, and throughout his career was in great demand. He painted all the main members of the Royal Family, Sir Winston Churchill, Edward Heath, Lords Mountbatten and Alexander of Tunis, Pope John XX111, Sir John Gielgud and many other celebrities. A most prolific artist, Gilroy also produced a vast number of sketches, landscapes and whimsical designs for Royle's greetings cards