Gleneagles Hotel Perthshire – Norman Wilkinson – c1930s white
The Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire along with the nearby Gleneagles railway station were built by the Caledonian Railway Company with the hotel once once having its own dedicated railway branch line. This vintage Gleneagles railway poster created by the artist Norman Wilkinson depicts a view of the magnificent hotel, which was opened in 1924, from across the famous golf course. The vintage railway poster was produced for the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS) to promote rail travel to Perthshire, Scotland. Gleneagles is still considered a fashionable holiday destination and a must-play golf course.
The Gleneagles Hotel and its famous golf courses
The original vision for Gleneagles was formed in 1910. It was dreamed up by Donald Matheson, the then General Manager of the Caledonian Railway Company, whilst on holiday in Strathearn. Matheson, according to the Gleneagles website, was so impressed by the local countryside that he conjured up the vision of a palatial country house hotel with a golf course. Gleneagles Ltd was formed in 1913 to construct and operate the proposed hotel and golf course. Plans were also put in place to replace Crieff Railway Station with a new station. The new station serving the town of Auchterarder in Perth and Kinross was renamed Gleneagles.
Construction on the magnificent three-storey Georgian building began in 1913. However, the project was halted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Construction on the hotel wasn’t resumed until 1922.
Matheson engaged the services of the Scottish professional golfer and five times winner of the Open Championship. Braid was commissioned to design and create two golf courses in the rugged terrain of the hotel grounds. The now famous King’s and Queen’s courses were opened on 1 May 1919, five years before the hotel.
Norman Wilkinson
Born in Cambridge in 1878, Norman Wilkinson attended Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire and St Paul’s Cathedral Choir in London. Both places he would revisit later in his career as a poster artist. He began his career as a commercial artist, with his first published work appearing in The Illustrated London News in 1898, the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine.
As an artist, he produced many oil and watercolour landscapes and was particularly known for his Maritime paintings. However, he is probably best known for his railway posters. In this field, he found his niché becoming an incredibly successful posters artist who designed for the London and North Western Railway, Southern Railway and the London Midland and Scottish Railway. Throughout his life, he was a prolific poster artist, creating hundreds of iconic railway posters, which helped to promote travel by rail during the early 20th century.
Wilkinson’s poster design was unlike any poster ever seen in railway ticket offices and on platforms. Its simplicity stood out against the norm of the time. Wilkinson was disparaging of the posters that had come before, even describing them as “an uninspired jumble of small views of resorts… with a good deal of meaningless decoration…” and “quite unintelligible at a distance.” Just as Leonetto Cappiello had rejected the art nouveau movement to develop a more modern style of his own, Wilkinson was to do the same in Britain.
His first commission was for the L&NW railway in 1905. His horizontal poster design contained just six words and a painting… of a ship. Not a locomotive or train in sight. Wilkinson’s image of a small steamer crossing the Irish Channel with the words ‘To Ireland’ in the bottom right-hand corner, was a revelation. It was a simple seascape of a small steamship crossing the English Channel on a calm summer’s day. Wilkinson’s painting was set on a dark brown border with the name of the railway company London & Northwestern Railway written at the top and the words To Ireland written in the bottom right, in blue elegant handwritten letters. Compared to the posters of his peers at the time this was simplicity itself. The design was so radical the Directors of the company were not keen on using it, and the design was only used thanks to the determined efforts of the supportive General Manager Sir Frank Rea.
The public loved it and it was soon followed by many more and not just by Wilkinson. The other major railway companies quickly followed suit, replicating the format, for their own posters. In fact, Wilkinson’s design format became the template for railway posters for the next thirty or forty years. His posters did an excellent job of promoting travel by rail. They are now highly prized by collectors, and his work inspired many of the artists that followed.
Other Norman Wilkinson posters
We currently have over 40 superb Norman Wilkinson reproduction prints listed on this website. We love them all so it makes it impossible to select favourites. Instead, we’ve decided to highlight six of our most popular sellers. Two of them, like the Gleneagles print on this listing, are golf related. These are the Golf in Northern Ireland poster and its superb portrayal of golfers on the 8th Green at Portrush and his Sport on the LMS Golf poster featuring a group of players on the King’s Course at Gleneagles. A popular print and certainly a personal favourite is his LNER and LMS railway poster featuring the landscape across the Cairngorm Mountains. Wilkinson’s Fishing poster is another stunner. It was published by the Travel Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as part of the ongoing “Come to Britain for…” series. And, it would be remiss of us not to include one of his posters that features one of his maritime paintings. So, we’ve picked his 1946 poster design that depicts the TS Invicta leaving the harbour at Dover. We also love Wilkinson’s depiction of a train crossing the viaduct at Monsal Dale in the Peak District. However, they’re all superb. You can view all our Norman Wilkinson posters here.
How much is an original Gleneagles Hotel poster by Norman Wilkinson worth?
Because of the subject matter, like many of the vintage posters, prints and wall art on our website this joint LNER and LMS railway poster is considerably rare and highly sought after. The Gleneagles Hotel poster rarely come up for sale through online stores or auction sites and when it does it appeals to collectors of golfing memorabilia, railway poster collectors, Scottish poster aficionados and general poster collectors alike. Its appeal across a wide variety of genres helps push up the value of the original prints. In 2018, an original copy of this Gleneagles golfing poster went to auction and achieved a sale price of £2,000.
There’s no argument from us, if you can find an original copy and can afford to buy it, you’re on to a winner. There’s nothing like owning an original vintage poster and they often make a great investment. Chances are in just a few years you’ll be able to sell it for more than you paid for it. Unfortunately, for most of us, an investment, even at the entry-level prices of the collectable poster isn’t even close to being a possibility. This is where our stunning high-quality reproductions come into their own.
This vintage poster is certainly not par for the course, in fact, we think it’s ace. Not only does it cost a fraction of an original it’ll look absolutely ‘braw’ when it’s framed and hung on your living room wall. Order your copy today.
