The art of a skier: Ski posters bring us back to another era of our sport

One of the many ski posters in the author's home. (Eric Wilbur)

We don’t have enough walls to house my family’s (OK, mine) extensive ski poster collection. While the handful hanging now might convey admiration for the likes of Vermont and New Hampshire, dozens are stowed away, awaiting either a basement renovation or seasonal swap. 

There are some of Dianne Mello’s original collection dedicated to ski areas in the Mount Washington Valley, one or two Ski Vermont posters depicting homey winter scenes, and a few others pushing individual resorts — “There’s always snow at Stowe,” “Winter sports under a summer sun” — Sun Valley. 

We have replica posters of places we haven’t been to (yet), including St. Anton and Chamonix, and some even from another galaxy (“Ski Hoth.”) 

There’s a comfortable sense in their designs, announcing to all whom shall pass the passions of the household members with brightly colored schemes that marry well with the furnishing. The winter scenes depicted never go out of style, even if the situations and scenarios over the decades have changed. 

The late Mason Beekley, a Connecticut native who founded the International Skiing History Association and coached skiing at Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Mass., was an avid collector of ski art. In fact, according to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted posthumously in 2011, Beekley “almost single-handedly created the market in rare ski posters.” 

Beekley wrote about his passion in a 1998 edition of Skiing Heritage Magazine, arguing that a poster’s “purpose is to deliver a message taken in at a glance, to momentarily fix one’s gaze, ‘sock the eye.’ A poster is not designed to be studied like fine art, but to instill an instant message.” 

As Ski Magazine once put it in a 2004 profile of Beekley, “Ski posters were the TV commercials of the first half of the 20th century, successfully promoting the mountain life.” 

That is why many classic ski posters from New England promoted snow trains to the mountains from New York and Boston. The Central Vermont Railway’s “Gateway to Mad River Glen” and another announcing weekend departures from Boston’s North Station to Maine are two of the most memorable.  

Swann Auction Galleries, New York’s oldest specialty auction house, boasts a number of originals in its collection, including its earliest from an “Austrian poster, circa 1908, which shows a man skiing in the magnificent winter wonderland of the countryside near Vienna. Also depicted are a modern and attractive skating pavilion and people sledding along a country lane outside a village in lower Austria.” Nicholas Lowry, the gallery’s director of vintage posters department, told Senior Skiing in 2018 that the earliest ski posters were printed in Europe in the 1890s. The first American ski poster featured an image of a female skier, he said, produced in 1896 to advertise the Christmas issue of Truth Magazine. 

“The market for ski posters took off in the late-1990s and early 2000s,” Lowry said, “when collectors, including Mason Beekley, recognized the undervalued segment of the poster market, began to acquire them at auction. … Our experience at Swann is that most collectors buy works to hang in their chalets or mountain homes. They focus on geographic location. For example, it’s unlikely that someone in Zermatt will be collecting posters advertising Sun Valley.” 

The classic ski poster era ended during the 1950s, Beekley wrote: “That decade marked the point at which skiing was becoming a mass sport. Ski posters produced after about 1960 consist almost entirely of enlarged photographs aimed at the already-existing large ski population, tending to focus narrowly on racing or extreme skiing to convey the superiority of particular equipment or ski conditions (deep powder), terrain and other attractions of a particular resort. They are often reproduced electronically in small quantities and intended for brief display at publicity events, ski shows and sports shops, rather than longer exposure in trailside stations or roadside billboards for a wide general audience.” 

Today, they are throwbacks to another era of our sport. They are familiar and nostalgic, a message that you’ve found your place (or where you might be headed), wherever that may be. 

Some examples of Beekley’s poster collection, which includes more than 500 examples from the 1880s to the present day, can be viewed online at beekleycollection.org. Poster art features resorts, festivals and a variety of skiing subjects. You can also view and purchase hundreds of classic ski posters and other images at www.vintageskiworld.com.