Roman & Mediaeval France. P. L. M... Avignon, The City of the papes... - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1927, advertising the PLM railway.

Avignon was the seat of the papacy from 1309 to 1377, and the Palais des Papes it built is still the largest Gothic palace in Europe. Ringed by intact medieval walls above the Rhône, with the broken bridge of the song reaching out from them, it was the anchor of the railway's "Roman and Mediaeval France" campaign for British travellers.

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.

Worked up from a high-resolution scan of an original impression, with mount board and scanning marks taken out so only the artwork is printed. Made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, with mounting and framing done in-house so the finish matches the print.