PLM. Lac d'Annecy - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1930.

Lake Annecy lies in a glacial trough in Haute-Savoie, ringed by the Tournette and the Bauges and fed almost entirely by mountain water - which is why it has long had a reputation as one of the cleanest lakes in Europe. The old town at its head, threaded with canals and overlooked by its château, made it a summer fixture on the railway's Alpine circuit.

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.

Taken from a high-resolution scan of an original sheet and straightened, with the mount and library furniture around it removed before printing. We print on cotton-fibre archival paper only when your order is placed, and mount and frame it ourselves rather than sending it out.