TRAVELING IN STYLE : The Lost Art of Travel : Before Tourist Snapshots, Voluptuous Travel Posters Fueled Our Wanderlust

Eighteenth-Century English aristocrats making the requisite Grand Tour of Europe commonly placed orders for paintings of the astonishing sights of Venice with Giovanni Antonio Canal--better known as Canaletto. A Canaletto vista of the Rialto, the Grand Canal or the Riva dei Schiavoni would, when hanging in a fashionable London house, entice envious neighbors to book the next tour south to sunny Italy. Today, tourists bring their cameras to capture famous views, while resort paintings are of the souvenir-shop variety. Between a one-of-a-kind Canaletto and an endlessly reproducible snapshot, however, a hybrid form of tourist picture once held sway. Travel posters--hand-painted by graphic artists for mass reproduction--flourished as alluring displays in ticket agents’ offices, beginning in the 1920s.

Artists would render imposing views of a famous sight, such as the explosive profile of the Matterhorn seen from Zermatt, or Barcelona’s towering statue of Christopher Columbus pointing the way. A y ou-are-there! excitement could be conveyed as a thrilling adventure or a romantic dream, by a wildly foreshortened water-skier at the coastal New Zealand resort of Timaru, or by a storybook-style rendering of then-tranquil Ulster, Northern Ireland.

A global market for mass tourism was being created, thanks to new forms of ships, trains and airplanes, a greatly expanding middle class that could afford to travel and sophisticated mass-printing techniques to seduce them. The hand-rendered advertising images displayed on these pages exemplify the come-hither posters from the 1920s and after, in styles long since replaced by the lush realism of color photography.

The posters shown are part of collection available at Flax, Inc. in Westwood, (310) 208-3529, ($500 to $600).