Dourdan, Peugeot Motorcycle - Ernest Montaut

Dourdan, Peugeot Motorcycle - a hand-coloured plate by Ernest Montaut from his album of the great motor races of 1895 to 1907.

Dourdan, and the rising speed of the Peugeot motorcycle: Lanfranchi at 123 km an hour at Dourdan, Giuppone at 132.4 at Ostend, Cissac at 140.6 at Blackpool, and Giuppone covering 102 km in an hour at the Parc des Princes velodrome. The Tour de France was won on a one-third litre Peugeot in 1905 and 1906.

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. Each print is made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, then mounted with a deep even border and hand-framed in our workshop rather than sent out.