Chemin de fer du Nord. Dunkerque (Nord). Editée par "l'Essi", Syndicat d'initiative - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1929, advertising Dunkirk.

Before the name meant anything else, Dunkerque was a working Flemish port with a holiday beach beside it. Malo-les-Bains, its seaside quarter, offered wide firm sand and a promenade an easy train ride from Paris and from the Channel ports - which is the pitch the local tourist syndicate commissioned here.

The Chemin de fer du Nord ran the lines from Paris to Flanders, the Channel ports and the Belgian border, and it advertised hard against the PLM's southern glamour. Its case was proximity: the beach that could be reached in a morning rather than a day.

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.

Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of an original printing, cleaned of mounting and scanning artefacts so nothing but the poster reaches the paper. Each print is made to order on heavyweight cotton-fibre archival paper. Mounts and frames are cut and finished by hand in our workshop.