Even if British resorts were as packed with tourists these days, one could not imagine Tracey Emin extolling the pleasures of Whitstable for Connex South Eastern. As absurd as that concept might seem, the present gang of privatised rail companies would probably veto such ideas for financial rather than aesthetic reasons.
However, these advertisements, which once enticed holidaymakers to the British seaside, now attract collectors from around the world to British salerooms. This poster was the highlight of Onslow’s (15/10 per cent) sale in London on November 28 last year, where it sold to an Australian collector at £6150 – some improvement on the £4200 achieved by a version of the same poster at Bearne’s of Exeter on July 3-4. An Irish collector seduced by the Celtic imagery of Hugo d’Alesi’s Tours in Connemara paid a double-estimate £3300 for the early poster, published c.1900 by the Midland GWR. ‘In Peace and War We Serve’ was the caption to a poster of Waterloo Station by Southern Railways, published 1947 – sentiments which appealed to a Japanese collector who tendered £1980.
Elsewhere, a collection of Russian Tass window posters sent for sale by the family of the cartoonist Sir David Low, who had been bequeathed them by the great Soviet artist Boris Efinov, sold collectively for just over £4000.
A little stick of Blackpool pietra…
If 1930s Blackpool looks like a British version of the Italian Riviera it is because this poster advertisement, right, was designed by a Neapolitan watercolourist, Fortunino Matania, for the LMS railway company whose trains serviced the Lancashire resort.
