Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware that I am a sucker for travel posters. I especially love historic tourism and railway advertising artwork. Recently, I fell down a rabbithole exploring the brilliant poster art by the Romanian-born Frédéric Hugo d’Alési who was one of the earliest artists to design posters for the French railway companies. These extraordinary works of art were printed using a process akin to chromolithography, called simile-aquarelle (“faux watercolour”), that required up to 20 different colours to render the final image, making them much more richly printed, detailed and painterly than the travel posters from subsequent decades.  D’Alési created hundreds of posters for the railway companies in France, Switzerland, and Ireland.