Iconic images of our best-loved beauty spots show how we saw ourselves - and point up how much the country has changed, writes Catherine Foley
Images of thatched cottages, sweeping mountains and rural idylls helped to market Ireland as a travel destination around the world throughout the 20th century. It's a selection of castles, colleens in shawls, fishermen in bawníns and windswept shores.
Come Back to Erin, a collection of Irish travel posters, which is on view at the National Museum of Ireland - Country Life, at Turlough Park in Castlebar, Co Mayo, follows the change in treatment of these iconic images as the decades passed. It's clear to see how, over time, a cartoonish sense of humour replaced the nationalist realism of earlier travel posters. The exhibition is expected to attract up to 45,000 visitors over the duration of its run.
Whether marketing the South or the North, "the images are similar in both cases - upland well-proportioned landscapes, big skies, lakes and coasts", says Séamas Mac Philib, the museum's senior curator.
"These images are authentic but they are very selective and very stereotypical and even when being selected, the thatched houses feature many times," he says.
Today, the softened, sun-dappled tones, the old-fashioned fonts, the occasional smiling face and the unspoilt landscapes are even more effective, steeped as they are in nostalgia and the past. Posters from the North include scenes from the Giant's Causeway, Portrush and the Glens of Antrim, while further south, Killarney, Connemara, the Dingle Peninsula and Lough Derg feature strongly. A sunny scene, which is likely to be Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim, shows an idyllic valley bathed in sunshine with hay stacks, a white-washed stone wall, sail boats in the bay and a man on his way home in "a conventional but attractive composition", according to the €8 brochure that accompanies the exhibition. The painting is signed by LA Wilcox. This same painter did a poster for the Fishguard-Rosslare ferry when the trip, it boasted, was "the shortest sea route to and from southern Ireland", with "luxuriously appointed steamers" and "express train services".
Another artist, Claude Buckle, painted a dramatic seascape for a poster of the Holyhead ferry in the 1950s. The emphasis again on the modernity and comfort of the ships is the selling point, says Mac Philib.
But, he says, "the biggest change comes in the 1950s when the cartoon style comes in. You could even call it a Mr Magoo style," he says. In one poster advertising Ireland as a destination using the airline TWA, "the natives are welcoming but in anachronistic contrast to the sleek American jet-liner", he notes. The message here, he believes, is that high art, reasonably comfortable houses and exotic castles can be found in this bucolic place.
ALL THE POSTERS"are playing on the nostalgia, it's about marketing. It's imagining Ireland. We are still doing this," says Mac Philib. "It is of interest that at this time and indeed throughout the period of travel-poster production, the creation of these images of a distinctive and symbolic Ireland, were often by non-Irish artists. However, the images by the Irishman Paul Henry were among the most popular and enduring."
Henry (1876-1958) was a Belfast man, and Mac Philib points out that although his work has been criticised for being repetitive, some of his posters were best-sellers in their own time and continue to be to this day. Henry's landscapes, which feature big skies and tiny cottages, "are virtually the same" in some of the posters, Mac Philib points out. Sheephaven in Co Donegal features in one poster by Henry. It was issued in the 1930s with the slogan "To Ireland with ease by rail and by sea" emblazoned across the bottom. Paul Henry RHA created work for bodies such as Bord Fáilte Éireann, British Railways, London Midland and Scottish Railways and the Ulster Tourist Development Authority.
The use of posters to advertise travelling began when a number were commissioned by London and North Western Railway in 1908. The Irish-owned Great Southern Railways began to use travel posters in the 1920s. After the second World War there was an increase in the number of tourists from Britain, and British Railways, which was established in 1948, commissioned some too. CIÉ, which was established in 1945, published several attractive posters in the 1950s.
Several Dutch designers, recruited by an Irish advertising company in the 1950s, were responsible for designing key travel posters. They included Guus Melai, Willem van Velsen and Piet Sluis.
On the whole, the thatched cottages and high crosses "were in decline in the 1950s but were still being used. They informed the character of Irish people in the same ways, only now we had become more sophisticated," says Mac Philib. In the later examples of travel posters, the images are more cartoonish. Edward McKnight-Kauffer, an American artist who was born in Montana in 1890, was quite conservative in his early work but his poster in 1948 for American Airlines is in the cartoon style with distorted sizes. "The lake is just a blob," there's a tiny castle at the foot of the looming mountain and "it could be quite sombre but it's not", Mac Philib points out. The idea was to make Ireland "less foreign for people abroad". This is Mac Philib's favourite of all the posters. "It's very appealing.
"In the post-war period, people are travelling more. [ The cartoon treatment] is a kind of a reaction to nationalist images that are too local . . . When you make it cartoonish, it's less particular, it's more universal."
The museum has purchased and collected these posters over the years. There are 37 posters in the current exhibition, all dating from 1920 to 1960. There are not many after this period as poster art in tourism went into decline after the mid 1960s.
• Come Back to Erin, in association with Iarnród Éireann, continues at the National Museum of Ireland - Country Life, in Turlough Park, Castlebar, Co Mayo, until Oct 14
• TomorrowThe Last Resort: Rosita Boland in Bundoran
