Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée La chaîne du Mont-Blanc, l'aiguille du Dru, services automobiles d'excursions pour Chamonix., Roger Broders 1924 - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1924, advertising the PLM railway.

The Mont Blanc massif is the roof of western Europe, and the granite spires around it - the Aiguille du Dru above all - made its reputation as much as the summit did. By the 1920s the railway had put the whole range within a day of Paris, and the poster artists seized on it: no other French landscape offered quite so much drama for so little invention.

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.