Enjoyed the holiday? Now buy the swanky vintage poster

If Jeremy Sacher tires of looking at a verdant Queen’s Park through the windows of his west London home, he needs only to step into his kitchen to find a view of New York’s Times Square or an Imperial Airways flying boat heading for Cape Town.

Sacher, you see, is an avid collector of travel posters created during the early decades of the 20th century to entice the adventurous into a world gradually being made smaller by trains, planes and automobiles.

Back then such ephemera was used as a cheap, cheerful and entirely disposable way to promote the services of shipping companies, airlines and railways. But now surviving examples of the best vintage travel posters have become valuable and highly sought-after.

Sacher began collecting more than 40 years ago when, as the head of a design company, he found himself making regular trips to studios in New York.

“There were many more poster dealers in the US than there were in the UK, so I became familiar with the world of collecting and with the names of the top graphic artists.

“Howard Hughes employed many of them when he owned Trans World Airlines during the 1940s and 1950s, so I started collecting posters advertising the airline’s routes,” he explains.

In recent years Sacher has bought through the art agents Nicolette Tomkinson and Sophie Churcher, who set up the specialist art agency Tomkinson Churcher in 2016 following the closure of Christie’s South Kensington saleroom, which ran a vintage poster department.

San Francisco-Hawaii Overnight! Via Pan American Poster

DAVID POLLACK/GETTY IMAGES

Travel posters first became seriously collectable after New York’s Swann Galleries staged the first dedicated auction in 1979. Now the best examples by leading graphic artists such as the Frenchmen Roger Broders and Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, the Brits Norman Wilkinson and Frank H Mason, or the Irishman Paul Henry can fetch as much as £15,000 apiece.

Tomkinson says the golden age of Britain’s railways during the 1920s and 1930s resulted in some of the best images but, by the very nature of their role as short-lived advertisements, few have survived — and getting hold of good ones is becoming increasingly difficult.

“Sometimes travel posters are numbered but in most cases we never really know what the print runs were,” she explains.

Fiat Jolly, Portofino by Charles Avalon, available at Pullman Editions

“What is certain is that only a fraction of those produced actually survived, because they were either pasted over or torn down. And when collectors get hold of the best, they tend to hold on to them.”

But some big collections saved by people who had connections with the printers, the artists or the firms that commissioned the designs do occasionally come on to the market.

One spectacular cache emerged in Australia about 20 years ago, having been amassed by the owner’s father, a teacher, who had written to the country’s various train companies during the 1920s asking for travel posters to use in geography lessons. He received more than 200, which were dispersed at auction for in excess of £200,000.

And while posters promoting trips to once-popular British holiday resorts such as Skegness and St Andrews continue to sell for as much as £5,000, it’s those depicting more glamorous continental destinations that many collectors find most uplifting.

Tomkinson says several such images have been consigned to a Lyon & Turnbull auction (happening on October 29) and include a 1957 lithograph of Cote d’Azur, “after Pablo Picasso”, which is estimated to fetch £1,500. And at his by appointment gallery in south London, the dealer James Manning is offering a striking 1930s image by the top artist AE Halliwell promoting “cruises to Norway” for £4,000.

A 1957 lithograph of Cote d’Azur, “after Pablo Picasso”, is estimated to fetch £1,500 at the Lyon & Turnbull auction

TOMKINSON CHURCHER

Cruises to Norway, c 1930 design by AE Halliwell, from Manning Fine Art

USA, Fly by B.O.A.C, 1950s

© STICK NO BILLS® 2025. COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES DESIGN GROUP (UK) LTD AND ITS OFFICIAL LICENSORS BRITISH AIRWAYS PLC & PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

However, travel posters are not categorised only by country but also by modes of transport and activities, meaning there are images that hold appeal to fans of cars, trains and aeroplanes, others that attract those drawn to the glamour of steam-driven liners and still others that are bought by regular visitors to top ski resorts such as St Moritz and Gstaad.

Buying vintage originals is not, however, the only route to getting some uplifting travel posters on to your walls, as there are now several firms, such as Stick No Bills and the north London gallery Pullman Editions, that sell brand-new, top quality images that are either in a vintage style or licensed fine art prints of exceptional posters from the golden era of graphic advertising.

Uniquely, Stick No Bills has been granted access to the historic archives of travel companies such as Pan American Airways, British Overseas Air Corporation (BOAC), Lufthansa, the Fomento del Turismo Mallorca and Braniff International Airways in order to recreate the best of their vintage posters.

Go by Train to Brittany original vintage 1956 Nathan poster from Manning Fine Art

Sizes range from postcard-format works to unique Master editions featuring 24-carat gold lettering applied by the Spanish royal family’s yacht gilder — and costing as much as £16,000.

Which might be the price of a darned good holiday. But the poster will last a whole lot longer — and there’s no need to endure the journey…