PLM, Thonon Les Bains, ses eaux, le lac, la montagne - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1929.

Thonon-les-Bains stands on a terrace above the southern shore of Lake Geneva, capital of the old Chablais province and a spa town built on its mineral springs. The poster's three-part pitch - the waters, the lake, the mountains - was exactly how the resort sold itself: a cure, a beach and the Alps within sight of each other.

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.

Restored from a high-resolution scan of an original lithograph, with the scanning marks and mount board removed so that only the poster itself is printed. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, with optional mounting and hand-finished framing in our own workshop.