Lyon & Turnbull | Travel and Vintage Posters

Lyon & Turnbull in partnership with Tomkinson Churcher present the April 2025 edition of Travel & Vintage Posters. This specialist auction features 100 lots of travel and film posters, as well as examples after David Hockey, with estimates ranging from £300 to £12,000. Of particular interest is a group of 23 posters from one of the largest and most important poster collections in the world: the Dr Hans Sachs Collection, restituted to the heirs of Dr Sachs from the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). The artworks are fresh to the market and have previously not been seen at auction.

Nicolette Tomkinson, Specialist for the Sachs Poster Collection: “Dr Sachs’ devotion to the poster started the long standing tradition of collecting graphic art in Europe. In the early 20th century many news products and services were introduced to the public by the poster and this group provides a window into society and leisure at that time. Many of the posters in the collection have rarely been seen at auction. The sale will offer collectors the opportunity to own both a piece of poster history and an artwork from this seminal collection.”

Dr Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist from Berlin, had a passion for the strong graphics of early 20th century poster design. He accumulated an exceptional collection of posters designed by the leading artists of the era in Europe, predominantly from Germany and France, as well as from Scandinavia and North America. His collection told the story of the first third of the 20th century and it came to be recognised as the largest poster collection in the world. Sachs also organised the first poster collecting society and published Das Plakat (The Poster), an international magazine with a loyal following. During ‘Kristallnacht’ in November 1938, Sachs was arrested and imprisoned. His vast poster collection was seized by the Gestapo; Sachs never saw it again. With the help of family and friends, Sachs was released and moved with his family to America, believing his poster collection destroyed. In 2005 Sachs’ family discovered that the collection had in fact been preserved in the vaults of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) in Berlin and launched a claim for its restitution. In 2012, the posters known to exist were restituted by the DHM to Sachs’ heirs, with a further group discovered and returned later.