Poster Resurrection at Leigh Gallery

Reproduction of a one-off unique large format poster which had been irreparably damaged.

A client of ours recently brought in this poster which had crashed from a wall in of his residence, where it held a primary position. The poster had huge sentimental and historical value to him. Broken glass fragments had severely scratched the original image.


We experimented with various media to match original colour and superficially repair the damage, but this proved to be too difficult to achieve, not surprisingly as the printed medium has a distinct texture and process.

The original was a printed poster designed for the London Underground. The poster’s design team had proposed it as an example of a new corporate image for the National Portrait Gallery, subsequently adapted and current to this day. The exhibition advertised in the poster never existed, it was just a proposal for the new corporate image, so there was no possibility to obtain another copy.


The only solution would be to either scan or photograph the original poster and to clean up  the damage digitally and reprint the poster facsimile of the original. The high cost of simply scanning such a large image (5 feet by 3 ft) meant that we opted for our gallery partner and professional photographer, Cristina Schek, to photograph the damaged poster with her high resolution camera, and for her to then attempt to produce an exact facsimile of the unique but ruined original.

Cristina took photos of the various poster elements and then, using her great retouching and designer skills, recreated the poster from scratch.

The result was an absolute success and our clients were very happy.


Here at Leigh Gallery in Hampton we have an open door to anyone who wishes to preserve and present anything of importance to them. Here is a list of our areas of expertise,  but if your requirements are outside these areas, then talk to us, we can probably find a solution.