Vintage Poster Archives
Jean Carlu Sirop des Vosges 1950 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Jean Carlu Sirop des Vosges 1950 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A blue-uniformed fireman trains a brass hose nozzle into his open mouth, steam rising, his cough extinguished. The hose spirals in brown loops at his feet. Upper left: the product bottle and a silver spoon. Mid-left: the slogan éteint la toux in a yellow panel. Above it all, LE SIROP DES VOSGES in bold condensed charcoal type, and below: CAZÉ. Printer: De Plas, Paris.
Designed by Jean Carlu (1900–1997), the poster belongs to his post-war French commercial work, produced around 1950 after his return from thirteen years in the United States. Carlu had trained as an architect, lost his right arm at nineteen, and redirected entirely toward poster art, developing a style built on geometric flat volumes and saturated colour that placed him alongside Cassandre and Paul Colin as one of the defining figures of French graphic design between the wars and after.
The Sirop des Vosges commission demonstrates what made Carlu's commercial work distinct from his contemporaries: the fireman metaphor resolves a pharmaceutical claim into a single visual argument, with no excess. The cobalt blue, cadmium yellow and signal red palette, the figure constructed from pure flat planes, and the stark white ground all carry the mid-century French advertising aesthetic at its most economical.
Produced as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, reproduced from the original lithograph held in French commercial poster archives.
