Qu'importe le moteur pourvu qu'on ait le pneu Continental - ([Variante de format, texte en français]) - an original poster by Mich, 1913, advertising the early motoring trade.

Motoring in the first decades of the century was an argument with the road surface, and the trade advertised on that basis: grip, durability, and the ability to keep going where the road gave out. The posters promise endurance rather than speed, and they do it with the comic exaggeration the period expected of commercial art.

Continental, founded in Hanover in 1871, was among the first firms in Europe to make pneumatic tyres for motor cars and competed hard in the French market before and after the First World War. Its posters lean on durability and grip - the studded "ferré" tread this one names was an early answer to bad roads.

Mich - Jean-Marie Michel Liébeaux - was a prolific caricaturist whose advertising work for the French tyre and motor trade traded on humour rather than glamour. His posters use exaggerated, cheerfully absurd figures, a deliberate contrast to the elegance his contemporaries were selling.

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.