Vintage Poster Archives
Cycles Plasson 1897 | Manuel Robbe Cycling Poster
Cycles Plasson 1897 | Manuel Robbe Cycling Poster
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A woman in a feathered top hat and olive-green jacket mounts a red Plasson bicycle, her gaze level and unhurried. Two companions stand in the background, their attention elsewhere. Behind the group, a scarlet sky split by bold white cloud-streaks fills the upper register, with spring foliage overhanging from both corners. The bicycle's large white-rimmed wheel occupies the lower foreground, its red frame carrying the eye upward to the rider. The shop address, 37, 39, 41 Rue des Cloÿs, Paris, sits discreetly at lower right.
Designed by Manuel Robbe (1872–1936) around 1897, the poster belongs to the brief, intense Paris cycling boom when French bicycle manufacturers turned to fine-art printmakers for their advertising. Robbe was trained at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts; he exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français and received a bronze medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. His Cycles Plasson lithographs are among the small number of advertising posters he produced before concentrating on colour aquatints, and they are considered among the most accomplished cycling posters of the Belle Époque.
The composition does something the text never needs to say: the central figure is composed and self-possessed, the background women decorative and secondary. In the mid-1890s, that arrangement in a bicycle advertisement was a considered choice. The bicycle, by that point, was being sold to women as a vehicle of personal movement, and Robbe's poster renders that argument entirely through stance and gaze.
This is a vintage cycling poster with genuine resonance for those interested in Belle Époque graphic art, the social history of the bicycle, or French commercial lithography of the 1890s.
