| Creator | Roger Broders |
| Printing year | 1931 |
| Sheet size (cm) | 100×62 |
| Printing technique | Lithograph |
| Printer | Lucien Serre |
| Condition | B+ |
| Asking price | on inquiry |
| Categories | Bern(ese Oberland), on the tracks | by cable car, Romandy, Switzerland |
In 1931, a touch of the Orient Express wafted through the Bernese Oberland when four carriages ordered by the French Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits from SIG in Neuhausen am Rheinfall were put into service on the Montreux Oberland Bernois Railway line between Montreux and Zweisimmen, together with two saloon carriages of the MOB itself – an extraordinarily elegantly furnished composition including a dining car, named after the American pioneer George Pullman (the Compagnie had meanwhile acquired the right to use his name in Europe, which stood for luxurious train travel like no other before or after him).
The service was primarily aimed at wealthy tourists from the USA and England, who were offered the greatest comfort on the journey from Lake Geneva via Château d’Oex and Gstaad through a truly magnificent Swiss landscape up into the Alps. And yet, after just three months, it came to an end. On the one hand, the global economic crisis threw a spanner in the works for the operators, and on the other hand, passengers were not even aware that they would have to change to the Bern Lötschberg Bahn train in Zweisimmen on the journey to Interlaken due to the different track gauges (a complicated gauge changeover system has only made changing trains unnecessary since the end of 2022).
However, this was not yet foreseeable when it came to advertising the new Pullman line – whereby it was in the nature of things that only Roger Broders came into question to design the poster. The French commercial artist whose Travel Posters not only shaped the Art Deco era; he virtually defined the genre (in much the same way that Alfons Mucha was the epitome of Art Nouveau in Paris around 1900). His two-dimensional, colorful and excellently composed motifs continue to unfold a peculiar depth effect that is hard to resist.
A masterpiece (even if you can’t see the Jungfrau on the journey in this way at all) and one of the very few posters by Broders with a Swiss connection – and extremely rare on the market.
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