Vintage Poster Archives
Croizet Fine Champagne 1895 | Auzolle Cognac Poster
Croizet Fine Champagne 1895 | Auzolle Cognac Poster
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A full-length figure in cadmium yellow stands at a stone balustrade before the Grande Champagne vineyards of Saint-Même-les-Carrières: harvest workers visible in the rows, a pale sky above, and a lace parasol held against the light. Below her, a notarised cartouche, signed by the Mayor of Saint-Même on 15 September 1890, certifies the vineyard's ownership by B. Léon Croizet. It is an unusual device: a legal document pressed into service as an advertising argument.
Designed by Marcellin Auzolle (1862–1942), who produced nearly fifty commercial posters between the 1890s and 1930s, this lithograph sits within the golden decade of French poster art. Auzolle is best known today for his 1896 Cinématographe Lumière poster, considered the first advertising poster for a film projected in a theatre. His commercial work for cognac and champagne houses shows the same qualities: warm palettes, assured female figures, compositions built to hold attention from a distance. The commissioning brand, Léon Benjamin Croizet's cognac house, established in the Grande Champagne premier cru in 1805, was awarded at the Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1900, and Croizet himself received the Légion d'Honneur in 1902 for his efforts to reconstitute the region's vineyards after the phylloxera crisis.
The Art Nouveau style here is restrained rather than sinuous: the figure is precisely drawn, the typography confident and varied, the vineyard background rendered with documentary care. It reads as much as a record of Belle Époque agricultural commerce as it does as an affiche.
Reproduced as a vintage advertising print using the giclée process on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, restored from the BnF-archived original lithograph. The warm cadmium-yellow, vineyard-green, and crimson-red palette makes this a natural complement to a dining room, kitchen, or bar setting.
