Description
✳️ High resolution vintage digital image
✳️ Heavyweight, lightly textured fine art paper
✳️ Fade resistant archival inks
✳️ Fits standard sized frame
✳️ Rolled and shipped in a heavy mailing tube
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Our Posters provide a glimpse of an era when the bicycle was the king of transportation and on the cutting edge of technology.
These posters depict famous races and racers, bicycle brands and component manufactures.
Beautiful women in elegant clothes are often part of the advertising message of these posters. This is because the manufacturers were selling freedom to women in the suffragette era at the turn of the century as much as they were selling bicycles.
Marcel Bruneliere began the company when he started a mechanics shop in 1925 in Machecoul, France, which specialized in farming machinery parts.
As a side business, he began producing parts for bicycles at about the same time.
The following year, he opened a bicycle manufacturing shop in some horse stables on Rue des Redoux in Machecoul, which produced two to three bikes a day under the brand name Marbru.
It was in 1930 that Mr. Bruneliere first used the brand name Gitane on bicycles, produced by ten people in the small workshop. However, frame production would not begin until 1940, when the company began producing complete bicycles. The company was renamed Cycles Gitane in 1952, and began producing motorcycles in addition to bicycles, quickly growing to the number 4 producer of motorcycle engines in France. At the time, Cycles Gitane began to sponsor bicycle racing teams as well as motorcycle racing.
The firm made its first big impact on the professional cycling circuit in 1957, when Jacques Anquetil rode a Gitane to victory in the French National Championships. This began a period of prominence for Gitane in bicycle racing which would peak in the early 1960’s, late 1970s/ early 1980s.