Rudge c.1896 Poster — Pal, Whitworth Cycles

— Poster —
[Lettered in blue script across a yellow panel:]

Whitworth Cycles

[Inside a wheel at the upper left, printed over a black open hand, left and right of the palm:]

TRADE
MARK

[Lettered in orange along the foot of the sheet:]

AGENCE Gle FRANÇAISE, 24, Avue DE LA Gde ARMÉE
PARIS
H. RUDEAUX DIRECTEUR

[Printed in black at the lower left:]

IMPRIMERIE. PAUL DUPONT. 4. R. du BOULOI. PARIS

[Signed at the lower right:]

PAL

[The second page is the same sheet before the agent’s lettering, with the orange lines at the foot left blank.]

[Three young women in puffed sleeves and wide hats lean over a brick wall above a yellow poster panel and look down at the scene below. One of them drops a red rose toward a cyclist in a cap and dark jacket, who stands in knickerbockers and tall boots with a black diamond-frame safety bicycle and white tires. Three more women gather around the machine, one in a pink jacket with a blue polka-dot front, one in dark skirts and one in a white blouse and full white skirt with her hands clasped, and all of them are looking at the bicycle or at the man. The blue script WHITWORTH CYCLES runs across the yellow panel, which is pasted over the brick with a torn corner and a bare gray patch of the wall at the left.

Jean de Paléologue, who signed PAL, drew this for the Whitworth cycles sold in France by H. Rudeaux, director of the Agence Générale Française at 24, avenue de la Grande Armée, the same street as Raleigh’s Paris address on the archive’s Raleigh poster of about 1895. The library holds two prints of the design, and both are here: the finished sheet with the agency’s name and address in orange, and a print without those lines that the library catalogs as before the lettering. Both carry the printer’s line at the lower left, and the finished one carries a round library stamp in the lower right margin, which is on the paper and not on the scan.]