This original educational poster was created around 1900 for L’École Moderne – Géographie par l’Aspect, a French series designed to teach geography through carefully observed landscapes. Numbered 5 and devoted to the Pyrenees, it was published by Paul Dupont with educational direction credited to A. Seignette.
The composition brings together four celebrated views: the surroundings of the Pic du Midi, the Cirque de Gavarnie, the Pyrenean mountain range as seen from Pau and the Col de Venasque. These sweeping landscapes are complemented by regional vegetation and figures in traditional dress, offering students a vivid portrait of the area’s geography and culture.
Lunois arranges the scenes within a remarkably inventive vertical design, using curved borders to connect the different viewpoints. Muted greens, blues, ochres and pinks convey the changing character of the mountains, from broad valleys and distant summits to steep glacial formations.
Alexandre Lunois was an important French painter, draughtsman and lithographer celebrated for his mastery of colour printing. His atmospheric treatment transforms this classroom wall chart into a sophisticated example of Belle Époque graphic art, combining scientific observation with a painterly sense of light and landscape.
Both decorative and historically engaging, this original poster will appeal to collectors of French educational material, geographical imagery and early colour lithography. Its detailed representation of the Pyrenees also makes it an evocative piece for admirers of mountaineering and regional French history.
Original poster
Education - Tourism - Pyrénées-Atlantiques
The surroundings of the Pic du Midi - Le Cirque de Gavarnie - La Chaine des Pyrénées Vue de Pau - Le Col de Venasque
Paul Dupont Paris
Good condition, traces of folds, a lack
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