Old mountain posters get us every time. They promise thin air, a good pair of boots and a train that leaves exactly when it says it will, and more than a century later the pitch still works on us.
This set comes from Artnap, a new public domain art archive that reached out to tell us about its poster collection. We spent a happy evening in its Mountains posters and pulled out eleven favorites, from Jules Chéret’s railway timetables to a Depression-era volcano that’s still smoking.
What Artnap is
Artnap went online in October 2026 as an archive of more than 550,000 public domain artworks from the open collections of 73 museums and libraries, including the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. It’s run by a small independent studio in Turkey founded by Elif Bayrak, and it isn’t affiliated with any of the museums it draws from.
The deal is refreshingly simple. Any work can be saved as a 2,500 pixel JPEG with no account and no watermark, and every artwork page links back to the holding museum’s own record, so you can see where the image came from and why it’s free to reuse. Most of the works are by artists who died in 1955 or earlier, and others were released by their museums under CC0. A paid tier, Artnap Pro, adds the museum’s master file, which is often several times larger.
Beyond the archive there’s a Journal of short pieces on single works, printable coloring pages made from old prints and drawings, phone and desktop wallpapers, and a Chrome and Firefox extension that puts a museum painting in every new tab. For a site like ours, the best part is the honesty about sources. Plenty of image sites blur where things came from. Artnap puts the museum and the license right on the page.
The Alps sell train tickets
Four of our picks were made for the Chemins de fer P.L.M., the Paris, Lyon and Mediterranean railway, which spent the 1880s and 1890s commissioning posters to lure Parisians into the mountains. Jules Chéret, often called the father of the modern poster, made the Dauphiné and Savoie sheet in 1881 and packed it with timetables and little oval windows onto lakes, a monastery and a viaduct. If you love this era, our vintage travel posters post picks up where these leave off.
F. Hugo d’Alési was the railway’s great mountain painter. His 1891 Zermatt poster is our favorite of the whole bunch, a giant Matterhorn over the tracks with the promise printed right at the bottom: leave Paris at 7:50 in the evening, step off in Zermatt at 4:10 the next afternoon. Twenty hours, door to door! Henry Ganier’s Lac d’Annecy does the same trick with water, all pink rock and blue lake.
A punchline and a lesson
Not every mountain here is selling a holiday. The 1892 poster for Le Voyage en Suisse at the Théâtre des Folies Dramatiques promises a Swiss trip gone wrong, with a grinning host in a tailcoat, a wrecked train and travelers flying through the air. Six years later in Denmark, Carsten Raun drew a horse-drawn sleigh careening down a snowy slope past a wall of fire for the Cirque du Nord. We’d buy a ticket to either.
Then there’s Alexandre Lunois’s Région des Alpes from 1900, a French classroom poster from a series that taught geography by the look of a place, split into panels of pasture, cattle, chalets and ice. And Lucien Baylac’s 1894 ad for the sulphur spa at Allevard-les-Bains, where a woman in a red skirt scrambles up the rocks as if the waters had already worked.
The American West, in silkscreen
Jump forward forty years and the mountains go flat, bold and bright. Martin Weitzman’s See America poster for Montana (1936, up top) and C. Don Powell’s Lassen Volcanic National Park (1938) were made under the WPA, the New Deal program that put artists to work printing silkscreen posters for parks, plays and public health. The Library of Congress holds more than 900 of them, and it’s the same look NASA borrowed for its retro space travel posters.
Lassen hits close to home. It erupted from 1914 to 1917, and from Portland we can see a few of its Cascade cousins on a clear day. The Federal Theatre poster for Lynn Riggs’s play Roadside, at the Musart Theatre, turns a mountain into pure shape: one peak, one winding road and some very big letters.
The rest of the set lives in Artnap’s Mountains posters, and every one downloads free at full size. Pick one, print it big and give your hallway a view!
