Indian State Railways. Muttra, Krishna temple - an original poster by Roger Broders, 1928, advertising Mathura.

Mathura, on the Yamuna in what is now Uttar Pradesh, is held to be the birthplace of Krishna and has been a place of pilgrimage for well over two thousand years. Its ghats and temple towers were a fixture of the Indian State Railways' campaign to sell the subcontinent to European travellers between the wars.

The Indian State Railways commissioned European poster artists in the late 1920s to sell the subcontinent as a destination rather than a posting - a campaign that sent designers better known for the Alps and the Riviera to render temple towns and hill stations in exactly the same flat, confident Art Deco manner.

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.