Rare railway poster for Gleneagles fetches £6,825
A RARE travel poster, showing a young woman playing tennis at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire almost 100 years ago, has fetched nearly £7,000 at auction in New York.
The poster, titled “Gleneagles / The Tennis Girl” was designed by artist Septimus Edwin Scott and produced around 1925 to promote the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS).
It also advertised the then brandnew luxury hotel, only completed the previous year.
The 39x25 inch poster was one of the highlights at Swann Auction Galleries’ Rare and Important Travel Posters sale in New York on Thursday night. It was sold to an anonymous bidder for £6,825, exceeding its £3,800-£5,700 estimate.
The Gleneagles hotel and golf resort was the brainchild of Donald A. Matheson, the general manager of the Caledonian Railway, after he spent a holiday in the area in 1910.
Construction began before the First World War but while the King’s Course, designed by five-time Open champion James Braid, opened to the public in 1919, the hotel itself wasn’t completed until 1924.
The new resort was hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world” when it opened.
Swann Galleries said: “There is very little historical mention of tennis being played at this ‘Riviera in the Highlands’, but as this poster clearly illustrates, there certainly appear to have been courts available for guests.”
In 1923, the Caledonian Railway was subsumed by the LMS.
Scott was a painter and illustrator whose landscapes were exhibited with the Royal Academy. He designed posters for the government during the First World War and went on to more commercial work between the wars, including a series of images for the LNER and LMS railways. In the late 1940s, he began drawing comic strips.
The auction also saw a poster promoting the LMS’S “night train to Scotland” fetch nearly £14,000.
The 1932 LMS poster, designed to appear in stations, shows the Flying Scotsman speeding to Scotland through the night under a full moon.
It shows a plume of smoke from the train’s funnel brilliantly illuminated from beneath while the lights from carriages stand out from the night sky.
It was sold to an anonymous bidder for $17,500 (£13,660).
The image, combining fantastic graphics and incredible rarity, was designed by Philip Zec, the son of a Jewish tailor whose family fled from Russia before the First World War and settled in London. Zec is now primarily known for his political art during the Second World War.
While many travel posters of the time highlighted the sights one might see at the other end, the LMS night train was about the romance of travel and the convenience of the night train.