Vintage Poster Archives
Premier Fils 1936 | Robys Aperitif Vintage Poster
Premier Fils 1936 | Robys Aperitif Vintage Poster
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Three thoroughbreds at full stretch, a jockey in black silks crouched low over the leading grey, and behind him an allegorical figure in a sweep of flame orange raising a Premier Fils bottle above the field. The bottle label is clearly legible; the typography below, PREMIER FILS, LA VIEILLE MARQUE FRANÇAISE, is set in condensed crimson caps on a heavy black ground panel, the lettering scaled for a wall, a café, or a racecourse concourse.
Designed by Robys (Robert Wolff, 1916–1995) in 1936 and lithographed by Affiches Stentor in Paris, this is one of a clutch of large-format aperitif commissions Robys completed in the mid-1930s alongside comparable work for Byrrh and Gancia. Premier Fils billed itself as 'la vieille marque française', positioning the brand on heritage at precisely the moment when French aperitif advertising was at its most exuberant. Robys answered with a composition built on speed and spectacle: the orange drape functions simultaneously as racing colours, as movement blur, and as the visual engine that carries the eye from the galloping horses to the bottle at the upper right.
The palette is spare and deliberate: charcoal grey horses against a near-white ground, the orange concentrated in the central drape, the crimson reserved entirely for the type. That restraint is characteristic of the Art Deco commercial poster tradition Robys inherited from his contemporaries at Affiches Stentor.
Reproduced as a giclée print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper with pigment-based inks built to last. Resonates with collectors of French interwar commercial art, with those drawn to the graphic history of aperitif culture, and with anyone who responds to a composition in which the typography and the illustration are genuinely in conversation.
