PLM. Stockez de la santé dans les 150 stations de sports de neige des Alpes et du Jura. - an original poster by Jean-Raoul Chaurand-Naurac, 1930.

Winter sports arrived in France as a mass pastime between the wars, once the railways worked out that the same Alpine lines they filled in August could be filled again in February. Resorts were built or rebranded at speed, and the poster was the industry's chief instrument - selling not a place so much as an idea of health, speed and clean cold air.

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.

Jean-Raoul Chaurand-Naurac trained as a painter in Paris and exhibited at the Salon before turning to commercial work, and his posters keep a painter's handling of light - particularly snow light - that most of his contemporaries in the trade had abandoned for flat colour.

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.