Alsace & Lorraine Railways, The Ballon of Guebwiller the Lauch Lake - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1930.

The Ballon de Guebwiller - the Grand Ballon - is the highest summit in the Vosges, a rounded granite dome rising above the Alsace vineyards with the Lauch valley and its lake cut in below it. Unlike the Alps it is walking country rather than climbing country, and the regional railway sold it as such.

The Chemins de fer d'Alsace et de Lorraine ran the network France recovered along with the provinces in 1919 - a system built to German standards and operated separately from the rest of the country. Posters in English like this one were part of a deliberate push to bring British tourists to the Vosges.

Roger Broders worked almost exclusively for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway between 1922 and 1932, producing around a hundred posters that did more than any other campaign to sell the Alps and the Côte d'Azur to French holidaymakers. His style is unmistakable: flat planes of unmodelled colour, landscape reduced to a few bold geometric masses, and a single elegantly dressed figure placed small against the view.

Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of an original printing, cleaned of mounting and scanning artefacts so nothing but the poster reaches the paper. Each print is made to order on heavyweight cotton-fibre archival paper. Mounts and frames are cut and finished by hand in our workshop.