Vintage Travel Posters
Sixty years of railway, liner and airline advertising — the designers, the printing methods, the standard sizes and how to spot a reproduction.
Vintage travel posters are lithographed advertisements made mainly between the 1890s and the 1950s for railways, shipping lines, airlines and national tourist boards. The names to know are Jules Chéret, A. M. Cassandre, Roger Broders, Ludwig Hohlwein, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Herbert Matter — plus the anonymous designers of the WPA national park series.
What actually counts as a vintage travel poster
The genre has a technology and a client. The technology is color lithography — an image drawn by hand onto limestone, one stone per color, printed at a size no other medium could match. The clients were the companies that needed to fill seats and cabins: the great European railway networks, the transatlantic lines, the ski resorts, the national tourist offices, and eventually the airlines.
It starts in Paris. Jules Chéret, working from the late 1860s, made color lithography commercially viable and produced over a thousand designs; he is routinely called the father of the modern poster. The French law of July 29, 1881, which liberalised billposting, then filled the city's walls, and by the 1890s Paris had a full-blown collecting craze — affichomanie — with people buying posters off the hoardings before the paste had dried. Alphonse Mucha's Monaco Monte-Carlo of 1897, made for the PLM railway, is a travel poster in exactly this sense.
It ends when the medium changes. Once offset printing and photography took over in the late 1950s, posters stopped being drawings and started being layouts. Everything after that reads differently — which is why vintage travel poster as a search term reliably returns a sixty-year window and almost nothing outside it.
The designers worth knowing by name
A. M. Cassandre (Adolphe Mouron, 1901–1968) is the one to start with. Nord Express and Étoile du Nord, both 1927, L'Atlantique of 1931 and Normandie of 1935 established the visual grammar of Art Deco travel advertising: a single object seen from an impossible low angle, reduced to geometry, with a handful of gulls or figures dropped in purely to establish scale. He also designed the typefaces Bifur, Acier and Peignot, which is why his lettering never looks bolted on.
Roger Broders (1883–1953) produced roughly a hundred posters for the PLM railway in the 1920s and 30s, selling the Côte d'Azur and the Alps. Flat unmodulated color, hard silhouettes, and a tiny elegant figure looking out over an enormous view — the compositional device that half of all ski poster design still uses.
Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American working in London, made around 140 posters for the London Underground under Frank Pick, who began commissioning designers in 1908 and built what is usually called the most sustained program of corporate design patronage in Britain — the same program that produced Edward Johnston's Underground typeface in 1916 and Harry Beck's diagram in 1933.
Ludwig Hohlwein, a Munich architect turned designer, brought the German object-poster tradition to travel work: flat planes, heavy silhouette, no detail. He later worked extensively for the Nazi state, which is part of the record.
Herbert Matter did something different again. His posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office in 1934–36 — Pontresina, Engelberg, All Roads Lead to Switzerland — are photomontage: cut, scaled and overlaid photographs rather than drawings. See Switzerland posters for how much that one idea changed.
Five periods, and how to tell them apart
| Period | Printing | Names | How it looks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1890–1914 | Stone lithography, drawn by hand | Chéret, Mucha, Hohlwein | Ornamental, figure-led, hand-drawn lettering |
| 1920s–30s, Europe | Stone lithography, longer runs | Cassandre, Broders, Kauffer, Purvis | Flat planes, extreme perspective, geometric type |
| Mid-1930s, Switzerland | Photogravure, photomontage | Herbert Matter | Sharp photographs cut and layered |
| 1935–43, United States | Silkscreen, WPA workshops | Mostly anonymous | Four or five flat colors, blocky stencil shapes |
| 1945–65 | Offset lithography | David Klein, airline studios | Loose painterly color, jet-age optimism |
The British railway companies sit across the second row. The LNER's campaigns, with Tom Purvis and Frank Newbould, ran under the slogan It's Quicker by Rail and were printed at quad royal — 40 by 50 inches — which is why original railway posters are so much larger than most people expect.
The American branch: the WPA and the parks
America's contribution came from a government relief program. The Federal Art Project's poster division, running from 1935 to 1943, printed an estimated two million posters from around 35,000 designs, almost all by silkscreen in small workshops. Only about two thousand survive; the Library of Congress holds the largest single group.
The national park series is the part everyone recognises: Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, rendered in four or five flat stencil colors with the park name in heavy sans-serif. Of roughly 1,400 posters believed to have been printed, only fourteen designs are known to have survived. Every park poster made since — and there have been thousands — descends from those fourteen sheets.
The other American strand is commercial and later. David Klein's work for TWA in the 1950s and 60s took the flat European Deco language and loosened it into gestural color; his New York poster entered the Museum of Modern Art's collection. It is the bridge between the airline poster and modern illustration, and the last moment at which a travel advertisement was expected to be a picture rather than a photograph.
Sizes, originals and reproductions
Posters were printed to a small number of trade sizes, and knowing them tells you a great deal. The British system runs double crown (20 × 30 in), quad crown (30 × 40 in) and quad royal (40 × 50 in), the last being the standard railway size. The French system runs demi at 80 × 120 cm, about 32 × 47 inches, and grande at 120 × 160 cm, about 47 × 63 inches — and anything larger than a grande was printed in two or four sheets and pasted up on site.
Three things distinguish an original from a reproduction. Fold lines: posters were folded for distribution, so genuine examples usually carry horizontal and vertical creases, and are often linen-backed for conservation. Dot pattern: under a loupe, stone lithography shows flat continuous fields of color with no regular dot grid, while offset reproduction shows an even rosette of halftone dots. The margin: originals normally carry a printer's credit along the bottom edge.
None of this makes reproductions worse to live with. A modern print of a Broders or a park poster hangs beautifully at a fraction of the price, and at 24 × 36 inches it sits close to double crown proportions. It only means you should know which one you are buying.
Frequently asked questions
What years count as the golden age of the travel poster?
Roughly 1890 to 1960, with the peak between the wars. The lower bound is set by the maturity of color stone lithography in Paris in the 1890s; the upper bound by the switch to offset printing and photographic advertising in the late 1950s, after which posters became layouts rather than drawings.
Who was A. M. Cassandre?
Adolphe Mouron, a French designer working under the name Cassandre, who made the defining Art Deco travel posters: Nord Express and Étoile du Nord in 1927, L'Atlantique in 1931 and Normandie in 1935. He also designed the typefaces Bifur, Acier and Peignot, which is why lettering and image sit so tightly together in his work.
What size were original vintage travel posters?
Larger than most people expect. British railway posters were commonly quad royal, 40 by 50 inches; smaller bills were quad crown at 30 by 40 or double crown at 20 by 30. The French standards were demi, 80 by 120 cm, and grande, 120 by 160 cm — roughly 47 by 63 inches.
How many WPA national park posters survive?
Only fourteen designs are known. The Federal Art Project is believed to have printed around 1,400 national park posters between 1935 and 1943, and nearly all of them were used and discarded. Every national park poster produced since descends visually from those fourteen surviving sheets.
How do you tell an original poster from a reproduction?
Look for fold lines, since originals were folded for distribution and are often linen-backed. Check the color under a loupe: stone lithography gives flat continuous fields with no regular dot grid, whereas offset reproduction shows an even rosette of halftone dots. Originals also usually carry a printer's credit in the bottom margin.
Are vintage travel posters in the public domain?
It varies enormously by country, publication date and designer, and it is not a judgment to make casually — many designers died well within living memory and their estates still hold rights. Buying from a licensed print source rather than reproducing a scan yourself avoids the question entirely.
The genre splits cleanly by destination and by transport, so browse the way the posters were originally commissioned: railway posters, airline posters, ocean liners, ski resorts, national parks or a single city such as Paris. For the format's own proportions, posters at 24 × 36 inches sit close to the original double crown.
