Vintage Poster Archives
Michelin Bibendum c.1900 | O'Galop Advertising Poster
Michelin Bibendum c.1900 | O'Galop Advertising Poster
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Bibendum raises a studded tyre sole against a flat cadmium red ground, turning back toward the viewer with a lit cigar trailing smoke into the cream upper margin. Below, MICHELIN runs in bold yellow slab-serif letters across a black shadow mass. The 'IMPORTE DE FRANCE' imprint at lower left marks this as an export edition of O'Galop's 'Le Coup de la Semelle' (The Kick of the Michelin Sole) composition, one of the rarest colour variants in the Bibendum advertising series.
Marius Rossillon, who worked under the pen name O'Galop, created the Bibendum character for Michelin in 1898, drawing on a career in satirical illustration for publications including Le Rire and Pêle-Mêle. His posters for Michelin ran from 1898 to 1911 and established the flat, bold graphic language that set Michelin's visual identity apart from its contemporaries. The Semelle design, in which Bibendum displays the tyre sole that absorbs road obstacles, appeared in several variants across the early 1900s. The red-background version is the least frequently encountered.
Reproduced here as a giclée print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based archival inks for long-term colour stability.
The poster sits naturally alongside other early automobile and Belle Époque advertising designs, and carries the kind of graphic directness that made O'Galop's Michelin work a reference point for twentieth-century brand illustration.
