Cycles Automoto Poster Gallery

Sixteen original Cycles Automoto posters, running from 1899 to 1950 — very nearly the marque’s whole poster life, from the art nouveau years in Saint-Étienne to the Champs-Élysées after the war. Automoto built in an industrial town and advertised like a national brand, and the sheets show both.

The early posters sell the factory as hard as the bicycle. One names all six Saint-Étienne works in turn and fans them out beneath a cloverleaf, claiming the machines are built entirely inside them. Another prints the company’s capital, its telephone number and its gold medal from the 1900 Exposition, and carries a line at the foot warning that an unstamped sheet may only be displayed indoors — which makes it a shop card rather than a street poster. A third shows the works lit for the night shift below a woman picking the marque’s own four-leaf clover.

Then the drawing takes over. Mich puts a bearded Zeus astride the globe, pouring bicycles out of a red door in the earth. An unsigned 1913 sheet races a rider against shooting stars under the line plus vite que les étoiles. Roger Broders, better remembered for the railway posters that sold the Côte d’Azur, drew a demobilised soldier holding up a clover in front of the works. Leonetto Cappiello drew the Automoto team, though the product he was actually selling was Byrrh. And in 1930 Lajos Marton twice cropped a bicycle down to its fork crown and handlebar and blew it up until it read as sculpture.

The late sheets follow the company outward. Lourdin’s 1939 tourist stands at a crossroads signpost with a map in her hand. André Bermond’s 1950 poster looks down the Champs-Élysées through a front wheel to the Arc de Triomphe, and lists what the marque was selling by then: bicycles, cyclomoteurs, vélomoteurs, motorcycles, scooters and sewing machines. Its champions belong to the same arc — Automoto carried Henri Pélissier, Ottavio Bottecchia and Lucien Buysse to the front of the Tour de France, and the results posters in this run were printed with a blank band at the foot for the local agent to overprint.

All sixteen Automoto posters, transcribed

Every sheet below is now cataloged on its own in the Ebykr Poster Archive, with its printed lettering transcribed line by line, its printer and agency credits recorded and its artist attribution checked against the sheet itself rather than taken on trust. The archive is searchable to the word and can be filtered by artist, decade and country — and because the artists worked for whoever commissioned them, several of these names also turn up on rival machines.

Browse the Automoto posters in the Poster Archive ›

Cycles Automoto spare-parts poster by Caume, 1899, a woman in a flowing gown rides a bicycle as chainrings and components float around her — These posters share a clear visual identity: bold Belle Époque and Art Deco lithographs promoting Cycles Automoto of St-Étienne, ranging from allegorical women and racing cyclists to close-up studies of chromed bicycle components and later scenes of touring and city life, all built around the brand's clover emblem.

Art Nouveau Automoto poster, 1900, a bejeweled woman holds a laurel branch beside an aerial view of the St-Étienne factory works — These posters share a clear visual identity: bold Belle Époque and Art Deco lithographs promoting Cycles Automoto of St-Étienne, ranging from allegorical women and racing cyclists to close-up studies of chromed bicycle components and later scenes of touring and city life, all built around the brand's clover emblem.

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