Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Torrilhon 1906 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello Torrilhon 1906 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A crimson devil, horned and green-eyed, grins from within a silver automobile tyre ring set against a coal-black ground. Two red lines sweep upward from his head like sparks. Below, bold yellow capitals announce the brand; red type below that names the city. The tyre ring itself carries embossed manufacturer text, making the product both frame and message in a single composition.
Designed by Leonetto Cappiello in 1906 for Torrilhon & Cie, a Clermont-Ferrand rubber and tyre manufacturer that had been producing rubber goods since the 1850s. Cappiello was at this date under contract with the Parisian printer-publisher P. Vercasson, working through the most productive phase of a career that would establish him as the pre-eminent French advertising poster artist of his generation. His method here is already fully formed: one bold figure isolated against black, readable in an instant. The conceit, the devil himself cannot destroy a Torrilhon tyre, is the entire argument, made without a word of body copy.
By 1906 Cappiello had already produced his Chocolat Klaus and Maurin Quina designs, which had shifted how French brands approached street advertising. The Torrilhon commission belongs to that same productive Vercasson decade, and museum retrospectives have consistently placed it among his most resolved automotive works. The record auction price for this composition reached USD 66,755 at Ader in 2024.
Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper using pigment-based archival inks. The deep black ground reproduces with particular depth on the matte substrate, preserving the high-contrast visual logic Cappiello built the design around.
