Alpha BRC Poster – Voit l’Obstacle poster – 1905 Vintage Automobile Poster This Alpha BRC Poster utilises one of the oldest marketing techniques in the world. Include a beautiful woman in your advert and sales will increase. Make that woman a semi-naked goddess draped seductively over the bonnet of a car and in 1905 you were onto a winner. That’s exactly what the unknown artist that created this stunning poster for the Alpha BRC company in 1905 chose to do. The poster was created to sell… well… car headlights. The artist has created an superb image that depicts a brunette ‘Goddess of Light’. She is portrayed wearing a teal coloured toga that barely covers her body and she seems able to gracefully steer the automobile with her left hand whilst steadying the newly produced Alpha B.R.C. light source. The poster reads: ‘Voit l’obstacle’ which translates into English as ‘See the Obstaces’. The poster leaves us in no doubt that the woman is confidently driving the car through the night under the dark, star-filled night sky with the aid of the headlight. The Alpha BRC Headlight B.R.C. were a French manufacturing firm founded in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. The company name was an abbreviation for Boas, Rodrigues & Co and they manufactured automobile headlights. The product being advertised in the listed poster is the BRC Alpha model number 10. It was described as a self generation acetylene lamp. It was 25cm high with a polished brass body and it featured a 6 inch diameter lens with 2½ inch bulls-eye. As the poster explains, the Alpha B.R.C. headlight took first prize at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair at the automobile competitions in Lyon, Tours, and Berlin. Original copies of this Alpha BRC poster were printed by the Parisian printers Philippe Chapellier, Paris. Other vintage posters featuring goddesses At the turn of the twentieth century, around the time this rare Alpha BRC Voit l’Obstacle poster was created, it was commonplace for artists to feature beautiful women as iconic goddesses. It seems that whatever you were selling around the turn of the century, including a woman in the advert would make a difference in sales. Over 100 years after this poster was created the image can be seen as clichéd. At the time, the idea would have been a relatively new one and the poster’s image would have been seen as quite risque. Today, we haven’t moved forward a great deal. There is still an abundance of images of women being used in adverts and posters. As the famous line goes… Sex Sells! In the 1900s, much like today, women were used to advertise and promote most products. Many beautiful women were depicted as Goddesses, Spirits or Fairies. A great example of this include Alfonse Mucha’s art nouveau depictions of the Seasons. Others include PAL’s 1898 Salon du Cycle et de l’Automobile poster, Livemont’s advert for Absinthe Robette, Lucien Baylac’s advertising poster for Acatene Cycles and the Gladiator Cycles poster by an unknown artist. A personal favorite is David Dellepiane’poster advertising the Internationale d’Electricite held in Marseille in 1908.
