Description
The Forward to Victory poster
Forward to Victory is a British poster from the Second World War, painted by Rowland Hilder for the Ministry of Information. A line of Royal Navy battleships steams out of the haze, the leading ship firing her big guns in a cloud of brown smoke, the White Ensign flying from her mast. Above them Hilder paints a loose, luminous watercolour sky. The title sits beneath in plain black capitals, the house style of the Ministry’s Forward to Victory series, which also featured the Army and the Royal Air Force.
Hilder (1905 to 1993) was born in New York and became one of Britain’s best-loved painters of the sea and the English countryside. During the war he served as an army camouflage officer and worked with the Ministry of Information. The poster is undated; the series dates from the early years of the war, around 1940.
This is a British poster, part of our small collection of posters from America’s wartime allies.
Read the full history of the poster and the Forward to Victory series.
Restored edition
Restored from a scan of an original print. The yellowed paper was cleaned back to white and the faded blues of the sky and sea brought back, with stains and wear removed. Hilder’s signature along the top edge is kept. Drag the before and after slider below to compare.
Sizes and options
- Paper print: 11.7 × 16.5 in, 20 × 28 in or 23.4 × 33.1 in
- Framed print: 12 × 17 in, 20 × 28 in or 23 × 33 in, in a black, white or natural wood frame, ready to hang
Printed to order in the USA on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Art paper. Free Standard shipping to the US. Compare the print sizes.
More naval posters
See Stevan Dohanos’s Loose Talk Can Cost Lives, a torpedoed freighter from the Battle of the Atlantic, or L. W. Bentley’s Setting the Course to Victory for the U.S. Coast Guard.













