Here’s Santa Claus using an aircraft rather than the traditional sleigh and reindeer. This has been a common event in aviation around the world in the modern era, with Santa turning up from the skies in a huge range of different types. This is an early example, with Santa using a post Great War Avro…
Tag: Inter-war
Man & Prop
An aquatint artwork today. Aviation seems to have only made the margins of fine art, like most forms of modern transport. Here’s an example which could almost be in a Renaissance collection. Entitled Propeller, 1934, William Heaslip, Associated American Artists, etching and aquatint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum (link). Artistically, it’s an interesting composition….
Negative KLM Shadow
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…
Box Plane, Sleek Birds
Today’s Poster is from the Smithsonian collection, and is a startlingly modern look for a period poster promoting the Farman aircraft company’s air lines, later the Société Générale des Transports Aérienes (SGTA). The contrast of the sleek gulls to the boxy Farman airliner, and the unusual yellow background and the remarkably modern logo make a…
Zepps! Gorilla!
I promised something more cheerful today, so here we are. Today’s pulp cover is the unarguably excellent ‘Zeppelin Stories’, this issue featuring ‘The Gorilla of the Gas Bags’ by Gil Brewer. With a cover like that, you know it’s going to be all good stuff inside, right? A bit of background from the website ‘The…
Heil Bone Hand
Today’s Poster is a remarkable one, from a German magazine in the pre-World War Two era, when the horrors of the Spanish Civil War were new, and featuring the classic propaganda theme of the slaughtered innocents. Here, however, with the relatively new inclusion of combat aircraft. In some ways it’s a simple image, as well…
Real Imperial
The Handley Page HP 42 airliners of Imperial Airways are a familiar sight in the iconography of the interwar airways system as we’ve seen here – their interiors less so. What aspects and details can you identify in the images? Based (as my colleague Juanita Franzi explored so well in her paper at the Aviation…
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…
Camo from the Copy
Today an advertisement thanks to Airminded on Twitter. As well as the proposition (‘call us to camouflage your buildings or they may get bombed’, – definitely not a “nice factory, be a shame if something HAPPENED to it” angle of course!) the aircraft caught my eye. It’s not a German type, despite the prominent Swastika…
Indy’s Matte Boat
Of course everyone’s favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones, travels in a flying boat. In this case in the first film, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. But how? Here’s a web page covering a ‘then and now’ of the Short Solent Mk.III that stood in for the extinct Pan Am Boeing 314. It’s the survivor at the…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 