Simplon-Orient-Express 1922

Few posters promise adventure quite like Roger Broders's Simplon-Orient-Express of 1922. Created to advertise the legendary luxury train that stitched Western Europe to the gateways of the East, it distils an entire journey into a single, theatrical image charged with the romance of first-class travel.

The design is a study in contrasts and invitation. An English Grenadier Guard stands sentinel, gesturing back toward the western departure points of London and Bordeaux, while a mustachioed gentleman in a fez points onward to the exotic terminals of Bucharest, Istanbul and Athens. Between these two figures the composition opens onto Mediterranean sunlight, where a seaside mosque anchors the scene and casts the Orient Express as the ultimate passage between two worlds. It is storytelling and salesmanship fused into one confident, sun-warmed picture.

Roger Broders (1883-1953) ranks among the most collectable poster designers of the interwar years. Working chiefly for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) railway, he lured a generation of travellers toward the Alps, the Jura and the sun-drenched Riviera with images of astonishing clarity. He reduced landscape and figure alike to flat planes of saturated colour, trusting bold shape and elegant simplification to do the persuading, and in doing so he helped define the visual language of the golden age of rail.

Art Deco, the movement that shaped this poster, emerged in 1920s France as a celebration of speed, luxury and machine-age geometry. Its designers streamlined the sprawling world into crisp, stylised forms and vivid colour, giving commercial art a new sense of glamour and optimism. Broders was among its most fluent practitioners, and the Simplon-Orient-Express poster shows exactly why his work still feels so modern.

At scale, an image like this becomes a genuine focal point rather than mere decoration. Its warm palette and worldly narrative reward a large format, holding attention above a sofa, sideboard or bed, or anchoring a gallery wall of travel and vintage prints. It suits a living room, hallway, study, home bar or dining room, and brings a note of wanderlust and history wherever it hangs.

Each print is produced to order on premium 189 gsm museum-grade archival matte paper using fade-resistant pigment inks, for deep, gallery-quality colour and crisp, faithful detail. Choose your size from the drop-down menu: 8x12, 12x18, 16x24, 20x30 or 24x36 inches. Orders ship carefully rolled in a sturdy tube, or sent flat in the smallest size; a frame is not included, so you can match your own.

This is a faithful fine-art reproduction of the original lithograph, colour-matched and printed to archival standards rather than a flat mass-market copy. It preserves the character and texture of the antique poster while arriving crisp, clean and ready to frame.

It makes a memorable gift for anyone drawn to vintage travel posters, Art Deco design or the lost glamour of the great express trains, and a lasting way to bring a piece of alpine and Mediterranean travel history into a home, studio or workplace.