Tour de France 1907, Hotchkiss - Ernest Montaut

Tour de France 1907, Hotchkiss - a hand-coloured plate by Ernest Montaut from his album of the great motor races of 1895 to 1907.

Tour de France, 6-cylinder Hotchkiss. In 1907 a 6-cylinder Hotchkiss completed a tour of France and of England, covering more than 34,000 km and setting a world record for reliability.

Hotchkiss, an armaments firm at Saint-Denis founded by the American Benjamin Hotchkiss, turned to motor cars in 1903.

Ernest Montaut (1878-1909) more or less invented the motor-racing print. Working in Paris in the first decade of the century, he drew the cars at full stretch, raked forward, with the road streaming away behind them and dust boiling off the wheels - a way of showing speed that motoring artists have borrowed ever since.

This plate comes from Montaut's album "10 ans de courses: les marques victorieuses 1897-1907" - ten years of racing and the marques that won it. Each plate records one victory from the great town-to-town races and Gordon Bennett contests, with the result printed on the tissue guard laid over it, and the plates were coloured by hand.

Prepared from a high-resolution scan of the original hand-coloured plate, trimmed to the image and a margin of its own sheet. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper at one size, with a wide mount cut so the border is even on all four sides, and framed by hand in our own workshop.