Before glossy brochures and travel photography, the poster was how railways, shipping lines, and later airlines sold the idea of a destination. The golden age of travel poster design produced some of the most accomplished graphic art of the twentieth century, and it remains one of the most rewarding areas for a new collector to explore.
The golden age, roughly 1900 to 1960
Travel posters first emerged in the late nineteenth century, as expanding railway networks and ocean liners made distant destinations newly accessible and companies needed a way to sell the romance of getting there. The genre reached its full creative maturity through the 1920s and 1930s, the height of the Art Deco era, when railway and shipping companies across France, Britain, Switzerland, and Italy commissioned the era’s leading commercial artists to turn transportation into aspiration.
The artist who defined the genre
No single name looms larger over travel poster collecting than A. M. Cassandre, the pen name of Ukrainian-born, Paris-based designer Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron. Cassandre is regarded as one of the greatest poster artists in history, and his poster for the ocean liner SS Normandie has become the single most recognisable image of the entire Art Deco travel poster era, a masterclass in reducing a vast, glamorous object to pure geometric confidence.
The railway specialists
Roger Broders is widely considered the finest specialist the genre produced, working through the 1920s for the French railway company PLM, depicting the French Riviera, the Alps, and the Mediterranean coast with a gift for capturing light and leisure that’s rarely been matched since. In Britain, Tom Purvis and Frank Newbould did similar work for the UK’s railway companies, turning seaside resorts and countryside escapes into some of the most collected British posters of the period.
From ocean liners to the jet age
As commercial aviation grew through the 1950s and 1960s, airlines inherited the travel poster tradition and gave it a new, mid-century modern visual language. Pan American, TWA, BOAC, and Air France all commissioned major campaigns, with artist David Klein’s work for TWA, using vibrant colour and simplified, confident shapes, becoming some of the most recognisable American travel posters of the era. Jean Carlu and Roger Excoffon did comparable work for Air France, carrying the tradition established decades earlier by Cassandre and Broders into the new age of air travel.
Why the category collects so well
Travel posters combine strong, enduring visual appeal with a genuine art-historical pedigree; the finest examples are studied and exhibited as serious works of graphic design, not just nostalgic ephemera. Because they were produced across so many decades, countries, and destinations, the category also offers real depth, from accessible mid-century airline posters through to five-figure Cassandre originals, giving a new collector plenty of room to build a collection at whatever level suits them.
What to check before buying
Genuine period travel posters typically show real lithographic printing and honest age in the paper, consistent with the authentication checks used across all vintage poster categories. This is also a heavily reproduced genre, since the imagery has remained popular for interior decoration for decades, so buying from a specialist who can confirm a period-correct printing, rather than a later official or unofficial reprint, is essential.
