Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Vittel Grande Source 1911 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello Vittel Grande Source 1911 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Couldn't load pickup availability
A blonde water nymph rises from a deep navy grotto, her face tilted upward, eyes closed, a thin white spring falling from her chin to the pool below. Small flowering plants cling to the dark rocks at either side. The whole composition pivots on a single vertical axis: the woman and the water are the same thing. Above, gold lettering announces the curative season, 25 May to 25 September. Below: VITTEL. GRANDE SOURCE.
Designed by Leonetto Cappiello in 1911 and printed by the Parisian lithographic house Vercasson, this poster was commissioned to advertise the seasonal bathing programme at Vittel, the mineral spring resort in France's Vosges department. Vittel had been a fashionable therapeutic destination since the 1850s, the Grande Source its principal spring. Cappiello's contribution was to distil the resort's water mythology into a single allegorical figure rather than a landscape view or a crowd scene, the approach that distinguished his advertising work from the decorative style of the preceding generation.
Cappiello (1875–1942) had arrived in Paris from Livorno in 1898 and was by 1911 at the centre of French commercial poster art, with over five hundred product commissions to his name across food, drink, tobacco, and leisure. The Vittel poster is among his more lyrical treatments: the nymph is rendered with a painterly softness, the saturated navy-blue ground giving the composition a nocturnal gravity that distinguishes it from his more high-key colour work. The printer's imprint, 'Imp. Publ. Etatrl Vercasson, 6 Rue Moittel, Paris', runs vertically along the left margin of the original lithograph.
Reproduced from a carefully restored archival source on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. Of particular interest to those drawn to early twentieth-century French advertising art, the design history of European spa culture, or the lithographic output of Leonetto Cappiello.
