I recently bought, on spec from Ebay, a collection of 48 mini-pub signs. They are hand-painted and almost all of them are mounted behind a piece of perspex of exactly corresponding size. They are mostly about 3”x 2” with a few as long as 5”. Some are depicted ‘as the sign’ and some are painted ‘of the sign’ – for example ‘The Whistling Duck’ in the gallery below. Pub names are, for the most part, written using letraset. Sometimes the writing is on the painting, sometimes on the perspex.
Does anyone know what they were for? Were they samples of an artist’s work? It’s a puzzle.