Today’s poster features a generic thirties airliner promoting the airline KLM by notable poster designer Munetsugu Satomi, dated 1933. This version shows the main routes around the border, a design Satomi used in other posters and seen elsewhere in the period. (It also relies on the poster being displayed complete, of course.) Details and some…
Tag: Holland
The SLV’s Dutchmen
Currently on at the State Library of Victoria (re-opening today) is the ‘Velvet, Iron, Ashes’ exhibition, which among several other great things contains an excellent selection of items relating to the 1934 MacRobertson air race. The display includes a newsreel highlights, and the promotional poster (seen above) as well as one of the many route…
Unsteady KLM
Today’s Poster is a strange, muddled and badly dated effort from KLM. Not all period advertising has a long term appeal, and the casual sexism of the poster hasn’t aged well. Moreover it’s not even very clear what they’re trying to advertise? Fly with us because our stewardesses might be harder working? It’s perhaps of…
Dutch Diana
A fascinating story here. Decorative art on aircraft (usually called ‘nose art’, though for obvious reasons not quite appropriate here) is nothing unusual, but the story behind this, current scheme is, I think, unique. Plenty of art has been copied, or created for a unit by all sorts of people from unit personnel to Disney…
Special KLM Bag
It appears this carry on is no ordinary one, but comes with a particular piece of equipment. Now, I’d have been guessing all day before I got is, so I’ll just reveal all to the left. It’s an iron. I can understand an iron being useful, and as we know they’re a staple in most…
A Balbo of Flying Dutchmen
Yesterday I promised a mass of posters for today’s post, and here we are. Tracing the variety of Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V. (Royal Dutch Aviation Company – KLM) ‘Flying Dutchman’ themed posters. First is the set with updated aircraft types (all overlaying intentionally similar ‘Flying Dutchman’ ship artwork) as machines and routes improved in the…
Stork on a Plate
When the Douglas DC-2 of KLM, PH-AJU, named ‘Uiver’, (Stork) came second in the 1934 England – Australia air race, the Dutch, understandably, went wild over the achievement. It was, by any measure an extraordinary achievement, as I detail here on the ABC website. The result of the Netherlands-wide enthusiasm was a extensive array of…
Early Fokker to the NEI
This poster is a bit unusual. Dutch airline posters featuring Fokker airliners aren’t rare, but there’s a few unusual things about this one. Created by Adriaan Joh van’t Hoff, in 1933, it is an expected Fokker trimotor, but not the ever popular F.VII, but either a Fokker F.XVIII or possibly a F.XII – very similar…
Fokker One
Motor magazine, April 1917. The Great War (1914 – 1918) saw an explosion of poster and pictorial artwork to help prosecute the war, by all of the combatant nations. It was the social media of the era. As well as government advertising, companies worked hard to bring their war brand to public notice, and among…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 