Automoto 1905 Poster — Eugène Villon

— Poster —
AUTOMOTO

Société de Constructions
Mécaniques de la Loire.

St Etienne

PIÈCES DÉTACHÉES
CADRES, MOYEUX, PÉDALES.
MOTOCYCLETTES
BICYCLETTES DE LUXE, ROUTE, COURSE
DAMES & ENFANTS.

Signed at the lower left, the letters set one below another down the edge of the picture:

E. VILLON
1905

Printed along the foot of the sheet:

SOCIÉTÉ LYONNAISE DE PHOTOCHROMOGRAVURE, LYON

[Three people have stopped on a road above a river at the end of the day. A woman in a long tan
skirt, a brown jacket and a peaked cap stands behind a dark machine with both hands on the bars.
A man in a pale jacket, breeches and a cap faces her across it, and a second man in a brown
jacket and a flat cap leans in from the right; each of the two is holding something small up
between finger and thumb, close to the eye, in the way a rider examines a part rather than a
view. Two more bicycles are propped behind the group and a fourth rider in white is coming up the
road in the middle distance. In the lower left corner a small boy in a blue and white striped
shirt sits astride a wheeled toy horse while a girl in red and another boy watch the grown-ups.
Three tall poplars run up the center of the picture. Behind them the sun is going down over the
water and a hill, in a sky worked in yellow, orange and lavender.

The word AUTOMOTO is set across the sky in tall orange letters and the list of goods is laid into
the sand of the road at the lower right, where the sheet makes its real argument. PIÈCES
DÉTACHÉES leads that list, and frames, hubs and pedals are named before either the motorcycles or
the bicycles. In 1905 this is a components business advertising itself as one. The name printed
under the title is not the marque but the parent firm, the Société de Constructions Mécaniques de
la Loire, and Saint-Étienne is given the same weight as the marque itself.

The picture is built around that final line, DAMES & ENFANTS. There is a woman at the center of
the group with her hands on a machine of her own, and there are children in the corner with a toy
on wheels. Nobody in the picture is racing.]