Leonetto Cappiello’s Royat poster puts almost nothing between a raised bottle and the viewer. A pale figure leans back against a dark ground, her hair and clothing sweeping toward the right. The bottle supplies the opposite movement, up and away from the body. Below it all, the resort’s name appears with a promise of youth and a reference to an atmosphere of radium. In the 1920s, those words could make a spa with an old history sound like the newest place to go.
Royat’s springs were famous before radium
Royat lies in Auvergne beside Clermont-Ferrand, in a landscape shaped by the volcanic region around the Chaîne des Puys. The municipal history describes thermal waters rich in carbon dioxide. It dates the development of the resort’s reputation to the 1840s. Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie visited in 1862, and one of the springs took her name. That association gave the town a story it could already tell about fashionable visitors well before the scientific vocabulary on Cappiello’s poster became available.
The main thermal building opened in 1856. Its architect, Agis Ledru, used large arches, Ionic columns and statuary that evoked the Gallo-Roman past. The city records that the plan had matching wings for men and women. The arrangement tells us something a landscape view or a bottle cannot show. A nineteenth-century spa took decisions about who entered which part of the building and how visitors moved through it. The architecture gave treatment and social convention a place on the same floor plan.
A railway viaduct brought an older bath to light
There was also an older set of baths underground. The city dates the discovery of major Roman thermal remains to 1876, during work on the railway viaduct. The features found around the springs included wells, masonry and pools of different shapes. One account describes an angular basin set within a square construction. That makes the viaduct more than a piece of nineteenth-century access. Its construction revealed evidence of how people had used the water centuries earlier.
Put those dates side by side and the city’s layers are easier to see. The nineteenth-century building was already invoking Roman architecture when railway work exposed further traces of Roman bathing. By the time Cappiello designed the poster, the springs had acquired another language of novelty. Royat could call on imperial visits, archaeological remains and a vocabulary drawn from modern science, depending on what story it wanted to tell.
What radium did for an advertising slogan
Radium entered scientific history in 1898 through work by Marie and Pierre Curie and their collaborator Gustave Bémont. In the early twentieth century, public accounts gave it associations well beyond the laboratory. Historian Matthew Lavine’s work on the American reception of radium describes the distance between the promises circulated in popular media and the more particular work of scientists and physicians. The Royat poster offers a French example of what the word could do in commercial print. It gave the resort a short, arresting way to invoke modernity.
The designer’s catalog dates the poster to 1923 and records more than one form of the printing imprint for the Devambez workshop. That small evidence belongs to the physical history of the sheet. The large slogan belongs to the sales pitch. A slogan can show how a business wanted visitors to think about the water. A measurement of the water or evidence of a health effect would require a different kind of record.
The picture makes its strongest argument through the gesture. Hair and fabric appear to stream after the figure as she raises the bottle. The setting has nearly vanished. A different advertisement might have shown the buildings, the Roman remains or the shape of the surrounding valley. Cappiello concentrates the entire resort into one movement that can be recognized across a street. Reading the poster alongside the city’s records brings all that geography and history back into the frame.
When comparing impressions of the artwork, start at the lower edge. The resort name and claim are easy to recognize, while the printing details are easier to lose in a cropped reproduction. The signature and imprint can help distinguish the physical sheet from the design that reappears across different copies.
See the artwork
The reproduction preserves the figure, the bottle and the period language beneath the town’s name. View the Royat radium water poster, or browse the French Posters collection for more reproductions.