Coupe Vanderbilt 1904, Panhard et Levassor - Ernest Montaut

Coupe Vanderbilt 1904, Panhard et Levassor - a hand-coloured plate by Ernest Montaut from his album of the great motor races of 1895 to 1907.

Vanderbilt Cup, 1904, America. Heath finished first in 5 hours 26 minutes on an 80 horsepower Panhard et Levassor, averaging 84 km an hour. The first regular motor race organised in the United States was won on a Panhard, and the whole French industry felt the benefit.

Panhard et Levassor of Paris built the first cars with the engine at the front driving the rear wheels, the layout that became the standard motor car, and their cars won most of the early town-to-town races.

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.