Grenoble / Exposition Internationale Houille Blanche 1925

Roger Broders turned an industrial fair into a thing of beauty with his 1925 poster for Grenoble's Exposition Internationale de la Houille Blanche. It is a rare travel image that sells not a beach or a peak but an idea: the future itself, powered by water and electricity.

In 1925 Grenoble hosted the International Exhibition of Hydropower and Tourism, a singular event designed to establish the city as a capital of modern energy and industrial progress. The fair was a genuine triumph, drawing roughly one million visitors across its five-month run and showcasing the region's technological ambitions. Broders distils that optimism into a bold, forward-looking design, casting Grenoble as a place where the alpine landscape and the machine age met and flourished together. Few posters capture the interwar faith in progress quite so vividly, or make an industrial subject feel so genuinely inviting.

Roger Broders (1883-1953) was a leading French Art Deco poster designer whose luminous railway images lured a generation toward the Alps, the Jura and the sun-drenched Riviera. His flat planes of saturated colour and elegant simplification made him one of the most collectable names of the golden age of rail, and his talent for turning any subject into confident, modern graphic art is on full display here.

Art Deco, the movement that shaped the poster, emerged in 1920s France as a celebration of speed, luxury and machine-age geometry, and no theme suited it better than the harnessing of 'white coal', the hydropower of the mountains. Broders reduces the promise of progress to bold, stylised colour, giving the exhibition the same streamlined glamour he brought to the resorts and railways.

Displayed large, the poster becomes a striking focal point, its confident design and sense of period optimism drawing the eye. It sits handsomely above a sofa, sideboard or desk, anchors a gallery wall of vintage and industrial-era prints, and suits a living room, study, home office, hallway or home bar, offering a distinctive slice of 1920s ambition wherever it hangs.

Each print is produced to order on premium 189 gsm museum-grade archival matte paper with fade-resistant pigment inks, for rich, gallery-quality colour and crisp, faithful detail. Choose your size from the drop-down menu: 8x12, 12x18, 16x24, 20x30 or 24x36 inches. Orders are carefully packaged and shipped rolled in a sturdy tube, or flat for the smallest size; a frame is not included.

This is a faithful fine-art reproduction of the original stone lithograph, colour-matched and printed to archival standards rather than a flat mass-market copy. It preserves the texture and character of the antique poster while arriving crisp, clean and ready to frame.

It makes a memorable gift for anyone who loves vintage travel and exhibition posters, Art Deco design, engineering history or the golden age of rail, and a lasting way to bring a piece of 1920s Grenoble into a home, studio or workplace.