La Route des Alpes 1920
Buy this print on Etsy →Some roads promise more than a destination. Roger Broders painted exactly that spirit into La Route des Alpes in 1920, turning a simple motor-coach timetable into an invitation to adventure.
The poster celebrates the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railway's clever bus service, which carried travellers into the high French Alps where the rails themselves could not climb. Broders frames the trip as an exhilarating aerial voyage rising from the warm Mediterranean coast near Nice up toward dramatic peaks. A cheerful motorbus threads the foreground amid vibrant wild flowers, a luminous yellow sky glows overhead, and ranges of mauve mountains recede into the distance. The effect is instantly seductive: you can almost feel the alpine air and the pull of the open road. Broders orchestrates the eye upward through the composition, letting the flowers and the little bus give way to sky and summit so that the whole image reads as a single, joyful ascent.
Roger Broders (1883-1953) stands among the most collectable poster designers of the golden age of rail. His luminous PLM commissions coaxed a whole generation toward the Alps, the Jura and the sun-drenched Riviera, and his gift for flattening a sweeping panorama into bold planes of saturated colour made his name synonymous with stylish, optimistic travel. Few artists did more to shape how the modern world pictured a holiday.
That approach was pure Art Deco. Emerging in 1920s France, the movement prized speed, elegance and machine-age geometry, distilling complex landscapes into clean, simplified shapes charged with confident modern glamour. La Route des Alpes is a textbook example of how Deco made even a bus route feel like the height of chic.
On a wall, a poster like this earns its keep. The saturated palette and assured composition hold attention above a sofa, bed or console, anchor a gallery wall of mixed prints, and bring colour, warmth and a whisper of wanderlust to a living room, hallway, dining room, home bar, kitchen or studio. It suits both the traveller dreaming of the mountains and the collector who simply loves great design.
Each print is produced to order on premium 189 gsm museum-grade archival matte paper with fade-resistant pigment inks, delivering rich, gallery-quality colour and crisp, clean detail. Choose your size from the drop-down menu: 8x12, 12x18, 16x24, 20x30 or 24x36 inches. Orders ship carefully packaged and rolled in a sturdy tube, with the smallest size sent flat; 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 fresh, sharp and ready to frame. Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of the original, it retains the subtle age-toning that is part of its authentic historic character.
For anyone who loves vintage travel posters, Art Deco design or the romance of the early motoring age, La Route des Alpes makes a memorable gift and a lasting way to bring a piece of alpine Riviera art into a home, studio or workplace.
