Cafés Labrador. Usine électrique, 7 rue Thiébaut, Le Hâvre - an original poster by Leonetto Cappiello, 1905.

Le Havre was France's great Atlantic gateway, the port where the transatlantic liners docked and where the colonial trades - coffee above all - came ashore. A roasting house advertising its electric plant here was making a point about modernity as much as about coffee.

Cafés Labrador roasted at Le Havre, where the coffee came ashore, and made a selling point of its electric plant at a time when that still signified something. The firm is long gone; the poster it commissioned outlived it by a century.

Born in Livorno and settled in Paris from 1898, Leonetto Cappiello is often called the father of modern advertising. He began as a theatrical caricaturist, and he broke with the decorative Art Nouveau poster by throwing a single arresting figure against a flat dark ground - an image built to register instantly on someone passing on a tram rather than to reward close study.

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.