Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée. Petit Saint-Bernard, Grand Saint-Bernard. Le Tour du Mont-Blanc France-Italie-Suisse-France. Au départ de Chamonix par les autocars P. L. M. - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1927, advertising the PLM railway.

The Mont Blanc massif is the roof of western Europe, and the granite spires around it - the Aiguille du Dru above all - made its reputation as much as the summit did. By the 1920s the railway had put the whole range within a day of Paris, and the poster artists seized on it: no other French landscape offered quite so much drama for so little invention.

The Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée was the largest of the French private railways, running the trunk route from the capital to the Alps and the Riviera until it was absorbed into the SNCF in 1938. Its publicity department was the most ambitious in Europe, and the posters it commissioned - Broders above all - are the reason we picture the French holiday the way we do.

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.

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.