Avec l'huile Energol A, démarrage foudroyant en hiver en vente ici - an original poster by René Vincent, 1930, advertising the early motoring trade.

Motoring in the first decades of the century was an argument with the road surface, and the trade advertised on that basis: grip, durability, and the ability to keep going where the road gave out. The posters promise endurance rather than speed, and they do it with the comic exaggeration the period expected of commercial art.

Energol was the motor oil sold across Europe by what would become BP, and its interwar advertising fixed on a single problem every driver understood: the cold start. An oil thin enough to move on a winter morning was worth a poster of its own.

Trained as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts, René Vincent brought a draughtsman's precision to commercial art and became one of the defining illustrators of the French motoring age. He worked for Peugeot, Bugatti, Michelin and the oil companies, and his elongated, sharply observed figures capture the between-the-wars bourgeoisie at its most self-assured.

Prepared from a high-resolution scan of an original lithographic poster, flattened and trimmed to the sheet so the design prints edge to edge. Printed on archival cotton-fibre paper to order, and available mounted or framed - both cut to size in our own workshop.