Percy Trompf

Trompf died of a renal infection on 17 July 1964 in Heidelberg, Melbourne.

Poster design declined in the 1960s as magazines and travel institutions increasingly used more affordable colour photography rather than specially commissioning graphic illustrations, for the sake of faster turn-around and for more persuasive realism.

Returning to business after the war, Trompf received little work from A.N.T.A and the Victorian Railways. His clientele reduced during the 1950s to the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau, the Commonwealth Railways, and Victorian Education Department for road safety posters. He produced also some book covers, illustration and design, including Under southern skies, on the Dandenong Ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Gippsland for the Australian Publicity Council.

In May 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and was commissioned as a pilot in June. Trompf served mostly at Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, and worked as a camouflage officer. He was demobilized in February 1948, with the rank of flying officer.

Trompf enjoyed a growing reputation alongside other poster artists James Northfield, Walter Jardine, Eileen Mayo, Gert Sellheim and C. Dudley Wood. In their 1940 report on the first annual show of the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists’ Association in Sydney, The Bulletin characterised him as "one of the few poster men whose signature is well known." In 1985, surveying Australian representations of beach culture, historian Geoffrey Dutton equates Trompf to Max Dupain, Charles Conder and Sydney Nolan.

In recent evaluations, Gilfedder, in analysing, as a sample, the visual rhetoric of Trompf's poster for the British market featuring Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay to invite the traveler to 'Discover Australia', concludes that such travel posters were early instances of 'country branding'. Symes perceives that railway posters of this period using state-of-the-art techniques of the new field of commercial art developed Victoria's tourist geography, locating, labelling, visualising and imbuing places and regions with specific recreational and leisure attributes and Pocock attributes such responsibility, on a whole-of-Australia scale, to Trompf's 1933 poster in advancing the Great Barrier Reef as one of the most significant tourist destinations. Dann and Barnes show how tourism marketing professionals including Trompf created a visual language of modernity, promotion and consumerism.

On 14 May 1932, Trompf married Vera Johns at the Methodist Church, Armadale, Victoria, Melbourne, and they had two daughters. His nephew (b.1940) was religious historian Professor Garry W. Trompf.

By 1931, Trompf was well known as a poster artist. "Scuu" in Smith's Weekly of August 8, 1931, rhetorically asked;

Clients included the Canadian Pacific Railway, Bryant & May, Palmolive, and the magazine Walkabout established March 25, 1929 by its parent body the Australian National Travel Association. For the latter Trompf produced posters targeted at a limited number overseas who could afford travel, and their designs and content reflect this niche market. By 1930, 100,000 posters had been distributed.

In 1923, Trompf began designing confectionery boxes and wrappings for Giles & Richards, a Melbourne firm of commercial artists, before setting up his own studio in Little Collins Street, painting and designing thousands of advertising posters, usually of 25 x 40 inches (64 x 102 cm) format, and 24-sheet advertising hoardings, for which Trompf supervised all stages of production, including the lithographic printing. He also designed books and pamphlets throughout his career.

An early client was Charles Holmes (later editor of Walkabout, also a client) chairman of the Victorian Railways Betterment and Publicity Board under Harold Clapp. Holmes had recognising the successful use of poster advertising by the London Underground's Frank Pick, and hired Trompf for a similar campaign in the 1920s.

Percival Albert Trompf (1902–1964), was an Australian commercial artist, best known for his travel posters, books, advertising hoardings and pamphlets promoting the nation's tourist industry and Australian and international corporations and companies. His colour lithography was recognised as distinctive during his career and since, Art Deco in style, and innovative in its use of flat colour. Some of his designs depicted historical events, including the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay, and advanced the iconic value of Australian destinations including the Outback, The Great Barrier Reef, and national identity and activities of sun-worship, surfing and bushwalking, using a visual language of modernity, promotion and consumerism. In turn his imagery has since become valued for its nostalgic evocation of the early mid-century and his posters have become collectible 'national treasures' that are frequently exhibited.

Trompf was born on 30 May 1902 in Beaufort, Victoria, the ninth child of Henry Alexander Trompf, a fruiterer, and his wife Catherine Amelia, née Elliott. His family later moved to Ballarat, and he was educated at Sebastopol Primary School. He developed an enduring interest in cricket and sang and competed as a member of a church choir. He became one of the earliest students at the Ballarat School of Mines' Ballarat Technical Art School where he left with his certificate in 1917, and where he was remembered in 1930, when his posters were exhibited there, as "one of Ballarat's most notable old boys".