PLM, Grasse, station climatique, la ville des fleurs et des parfums - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1927.

Grasse has been the centre of the world's perfume trade since the eighteenth century, when its tanners turned to scenting leather gloves and never looked back. Set in the hills above Cannes with fields of jasmine and rose below it, the town sold itself as a climatic resort as well - flowers, scent and clean air in a single pitch.

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.

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.