National Trust is a humanist

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

typeface designed by Paul Barnes for the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is a corporate font family and not available for licensing. National Trust is based on an inscription dated around 1748 on the Stourhead estate, part-owned by the National Trust since 1946. The inscription on which the font is based is an epigram, ''The Nymph of the Spring,'' in the grotto beside the lake where a statue of a nymph sleeps, and is in a mostly

style, one of the first such uses of the style since classical antiquity. The unusual style of the inscription came to the attention of historians, most famously James Mosley, whose work ''The Nymph and the Grot'' on early sans-serif lettering is named after it. Mosley has concluded that he cannot be certain of the source of the style and that it does not seem to have influenced successors, but that its unusual, simplified structure may be an "exercise in rusticity" related to the spirit of the construction, intended to imitate a natural cave. As the inscription was destroyed by mistake in 1967, it had to be replicated from Mosley's photographs. Being based on the Stourhead inscription makes National Trust a "stressed" or "modulated" sans-serif, with a clear difference between horizontal and vertical stroke widths. Other typefaces in this style include Optima (inspired by medieval inscriptions from

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

), Britannic and Radiant. The four line poem, translated into English from Latin by Alexander Pope, was attributed to an inscription on a legendary Roman fountain with a statue of a sleeping nymph above the River Danube. The motif of a sleeping nymph besides a fountain was popular with

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

humanists and influential among neoclassical garden designers, but is now generally suspected to be a fifteenth-century forgery. In English, it runs:

Nymph of the Grot, these sacred springs I keep
And to the murmur of these waters sleep
Ah spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave
And drink in silence, or in silence lave.

References

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External links

Fonts In Use

Touching The Past
video of a talk by Paul Barnes discussing the design in 2013 Humanist sans-serif typefaces Corporate typefaces National Trust Typefaces designed by Paul Barnes (designer) Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2009 Typefaces with optical sizes