Travel

Vintage travel posters: the world sold in flat colour

Between the wars, railway companies, airlines and resort towns hired illustrators rather than photographers, and the results were posters that behave like windows: a diagonal line, a horizon, a few saturated colours and lettering you can read from twenty metres.

That is why they hang so well in a hallway or above a desk. They were never meant to be looked at closely, and they do not ask to be.

What is in this collection

• Green Line — the stagecoach joke, English and gentle.
• French railways — the PLM school of flat colour.
• Japan Railways — one vanishing point and acid green.
• Aéropostale — the mail plane over the tropics.
• Monaco and Le Mans — speed as a graphic.

How these posters were made

Most were lithographs printed in four or five flat colours on cheap poster paper, then pasted onto station walls and thrown away at the end of the season. The originals that survive are usually the ones that were never used, which is why the colours on a good one still look unreal.

What a modern print keeps is that flatness. There is no grain, no photograph, no attempt at depth — just ink on paper, at a size you can hang without a story attached.

How to choose, and how to hang

Pick by place if you have a connection to it, and by colour if you do not. The warm ones — Italy, the Riviera, the desert — belong in rooms with wood; the cold ones — alpine, northern, night — belong where the light is already bright.

Two travel posters side by side read as a pair if they share a palette; three or more need identical frames and a level line, otherwise the wall looks like a travel agent's window rather than a collection.

For the winter half of the same tradition, go to ski. For the graphic language that came out of it, Bauhaus.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave within 24 hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, in a tracked tube.