Peugeot c.1891 Poster — Vélocipèdes Peugeot

— Poster —
Vélocipèdes
Peugeot

MARQUE DE FABRIQUE

Les Fils de
PEUGEOT Frères

VALENTIGNEY (DOUBS)

MAISON DE VENTE, 32, Avenue de la Grande Armée, PARIS.

[Printed up the right-hand edge of the sheet:]

IMP. LEMERCIER & Cie, 57, RUE DE SEINE. PARIS.

[A small hexagonal stamp in violet ink with a seated figure is struck on the paper in the left margin; its lettering does not resolve. A small paper accession label is pasted at the upper right corner.]

[The title is set across the sky in two lines of ornamental capitals, VÉLOCIPÈDES in alternating blue and red and PEUGEOT in yellow and black, and both lines are threaded through a riveted iron frame that runs down the sheet like a girder. Hanging from that frame at the left is the firm’s trademark, drawn as a cast iron plaque: a lion walking on an arrow under the words MARQUE DE FABRIQUE, with three gold medals hung beneath it.

Below, a rider in a red and black striped jersey and a striped cap swings a cross-frame safety bicycle round a bend toward the viewer, its front wheel noticeably larger than the rear. Behind him a second rider in a yellow and green striped jersey leads a pack round a cinder track.

The sheet speaks for a firm that was carrying an iron trade into a new product. The lion on the arrow had marked the family’s steel goods, saws and springs and corset stays, for a generation, and here it is presented as a badge of metal bolted to an iron frame above a bicycle. The word on the sheet is still VÉLOCIPÈDES, the older French word for the machine. The address at the foot is the Paris sales house at 32, avenue de la Grande Armée, the street where the cycle trade of the 1890s kept its showrooms; the Raleigh agency stood a few doors away at number 27.]