In his heyday in the period before the First World War, the versatile British artist John Hassall (1868–1948) was often referred to as ‘the Poster King’. Hassall also produced illustrations, postcards and various other kinds of applied design but nowadays, as Lucinda Gosling acknowledges in her account of Hassall’s life and work, he is mostly remembered for his poster Skegness is So Bracing, commissioned by the Great Northern Railway to promote the Lincolnshire resort. The figure of the jolly fisherman on the beach established a spirited and enduringly popular icon for the English seaside. Although it was not the first of Hassall’s travel posters, it was the design where subject, humour and design combined most successfully and memorably.