The Dumbarton Oaks Archives Ephemera Project has acquired a poster promoting train and bus visits to the Loire Valley in France. Designed in 1967 by the graphic artist Bernard Villemot (1911–1989) for the SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français), France’s national state-owned railway company, the poster foregrounds one of the Renaissance formal gardens at the Château de Villandry. Seen in the distance across the Loire Valley is the Château de Chaumont, relocated by the artist from its true location further down the river. The Château de Villandry and its gardens were arguably the star venue of tourism in the Loire Valley as it regained momentum in the mid-twentieth century. The poster’s purpose was to further increase visitation to the area by means of the formal garden image’s allure.
Villandry had been acquired in 1906 by the Spanish doctor Joachim Carvallo (1869–1936). Between 1908 and 1918, he restored the chateau and transformed the then-existing English-style informal gardens into formal gardens more consistent with the history of the chateau. For his Renaissance garden reconstructions, Carvallo employed the sixteenth-century book Les dessins des plus excellents bâtiments de France by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, a copy of which is also in the Rare Book Collection at Dumbarton Oaks.
The poster’s artist, Bernard Villemot, was a graphic artist who, between 1932 and 1934, had studied in Paris with the artist Paul Colin. In the mid-1940s, he began designing posters, including a famous series of travel posters for Air France. Villemot is known in France as one of the last great poster artists of the twentieth century and for his ability to distill an advertising message to a memorable image with simple elegant lines and bold colors. Three books have been published that survey his art: Jean-Francois Bazin, Les affiches de Villemot, (1985); Guillaume Villemot, Villemot: l’affiche de A à Z (2005); and George H. Bon Salle, Embracing an Icon: the Posters of Bernard Villemot (2015).
