Vintage Poster Archives
Carigiet Holidays in Switzerland 1938 | Vintage Travel Poster
Carigiet Holidays in Switzerland 1938 | Vintage Travel Poster
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A weathervane-style wooden signpost rises against a pale sky, its four diamond-shaped arms each carrying a small painted landscape: Spring, with a blossoming tree and a southern-Swiss village in terracotta and pink; Summer, with a glaciated peak above dark conifers and a chalet; Autumn, with bare white branches and a red-roofed farmhouse beside a lake. The fourth arm carries the Swiss national flag. A yellow-green songbird perches at the very top of the post, and the snowy Alpine skyline runs quietly along the lower horizon. Bold black slab-serif letters read HOLIDAYS IN SWITZERLAND across the foot of the composition.
Alois Carigiet (1902-1985) designed this poster in 1938 for the Swiss National Tourist Office, printed by Ringier & Co. Ltd., Zofingen. Born in Trun, Graubünden, Carigiet had produced more than a hundred tourism and commercial posters by the late 1930s, and this signpost composition was among the most distributed: issued simultaneously in German, French and English editions, it appeared in MoMA exhibitions in 1941 and 1944. The design packs four complete Swiss seasonal landscapes into a single architectural device, each one a convincing miniature painting within the larger graphic structure.
The poster belongs to Swiss interwar tourism graphics at their most painterly: confident enough in illustration to step back from the hard geometry of pure Art Deco, yet structured and typographically assured in the tradition of the best Ringier-printed Swiss work of the era. Carigiet later won the inaugural Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966, but his poster output from the 1930s remains the foundation of his reputation as a graphic designer.
Reproduced from archival sources on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, this print retains the warmth of Carigiet's original palette. It suits a study, living room or hallway, and sits naturally in any collection of European travel or Swiss graphic design.
