Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Eau des Récollets 1912 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello Eau des Récollets 1912 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A winged figure in a crimson red gown rises above a rocky spring at Longwy, a branded water bottle raised in one hand and a stemmed glass catching the white jet of mineral water in the other. The composition is set against a flat cobalt blue ground, the saturated red and dark navy of the wings producing the high-contrast, single-glance legibility that defined Leonetto Cappiello's Paris commercial work from 1903 onward.
Designed by Cappiello in 1912 for F. de Saintignon et Cie, proprietors of the Récollets artesian spring at Longwy-Bas in Lorraine, France. Saintignon had discovered the source in 1907, developed it as a spa product, and commissioned a hotel and this poster in 1912 to promote the water as a therapeutic treatment for arthritis. Cappiello was then the foremost advertising lithographer in Paris, midway through a career that would produce more than 530 posters and earn him the description 'father of modern advertising'. The gilt lettering, the bold flat gown, and the allegorical winged figure place the design at the intersection of Belle Époque tradition and the simplified graphic vocabulary that Cappiello was actively pioneering. The archival source is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue raisonné entry 1573.
This reproduction is printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper using pigment-based archival inks, restored from the BnF archival source. The Récollets spa venture ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914; the poster survives as one of the few visual records of the project.
Draws interest from collectors of early twentieth-century French commercial lithography, Cappiello specialists, and anyone researching the Belle Époque advertising tradition in provincial France.
