Vintage Poster Archives
Menthe-Pastille Giffard 1937 | Dornellas Vintage Ad Poster
Menthe-Pastille Giffard 1937 | Dornellas Vintage Ad Poster
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A green satyr bounds across a warm peach-cream ground, one hand raised with a small horn, the other extending a bottle of Menthe-Pastille toward the viewer. The figure is rendered in flat leaf green and near-black, in a loose brush style that fills the composition with forward movement. Bold black slab-serif type anchors the lower third: 'MENTHE-PASTILLE', with 'LIQUEUR E. GIFFARD.' in orange and 'BLANCHE ou VERTE' in italic green below. The printer credit at lower left reads Vercasson, Paris. Upper right: DORNELLAS No 57.
Menthe-Pastille was invented in 1885 by Émile Giffard, a pharmacist in Angers who converted his dispensary into a distillery after his peppermint liqueur outgrew its pharmaceutical origins. Giffard's company commissioned a succession of notable French poster artists across the following five decades: Léonetto Cappiello contributed a red-figure composition in 1906, Baudrier Foucault designed the celebrated whale poster of 1925. Dornellas's 1937 version continues the series with a green satyr figure that acknowledges Cappiello's earlier idiom while adopting the flatter, bolder graphic approach of interwar French commercial printing.
The Giclée process, printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper with pigment-based archival inks, reproduces the flat colour fields and hand-lettered type of the original offset lithograph with precision. The peach-to-orange gradient of the ground and the sharp green-to-black modelling of the satyr both hold cleanly on the matte surface.
A natural choice for anyone drawn to 1930s French advertising art, the Giffard poster series, or the graphic vocabulary of the interwar aperitif poster.
