Collection: Irish Posters

Flat colour, hard edges, one place reduced to the three shapes that make it recognisable. The travel poster was a commercial form with a job to do — put a coastline on a booking-hall wall and make someone want to go — and it turns out to suit Ireland unreasonably well.

What these actually are

Almost everything here is an original design drawn in that idiom rather than a period original: the Cliffs of Moher, Fastnet Rock, the Giant's Causeway, Cobh, Donegal, the Twelve Bens, Ballinalacken Castle, Fanad Head, the Burren and Glenveagh. Drawn now, in the tradition of the railway and airline posters that once hung in ferry terminals — not scans of somebody else's work.

There is one genuine period piece in the set. The Seachtain na Gaeilge poster is from 1913, made for Irish Language Week during the revival, and it puts its question to the reader directly: on which side are you? It is the oldest thing in the collection by a century, and the only one that was ever posted on a wall for a purpose other than decoration.

Hanging them as a set

Most are on the same A-series sheet with the same margins, so they hang as a row without a ruler. Two side by side over a hall table; three across a landing; the coast down a stairwell, one riser at a time. The Irish-language word prints that used to sit here have their own set at The Irish Word Prints.

Paper and framing

Pigment inks on 250gsm archival matte paper — acid-free, uncoated, off-white, which is what keeps flat poster colour flat instead of glossy. Framed in solid oak or ash with shatterproof glazing and a hanging kit, or unframed for your own framer. Made to order, free worldwide shipping.

For genuinely old Irish images — period Dublin views, Malton's 1795 survey of Dublin Bay, eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings — see Vintage Irish Prints. The full catalogue is in Irish Art Prints.