|
|
 |
Title: La Raphaëlle Liqueur Bonal
Description: Alcohol and airplanes, although not an obvious or sober combination, often appeared in advertising together. Companies brewing up champagne and other intoxicating beverages, like La Raphaëlle liqueur, used the airplane as a foil, to put into context the historic nature of their particular liquor. This poster, for example, contrasts the La Raphaëlle, the purported oldest liqueur of the Dauphine region of France, with the world’s newest invention, the flying machine. La Raphaëlle, created in 1865, is an herbal-flavored alcoholic beverage that includes yellow gentian, a common flavoring in liqueurs in the Alpine regions of France and reputed to have stomach-soothing properties. The liqueur was curiously similar to Chartreuse, the famous French herbal liqueur made by the monks of the Carthusian monastery of the Dauphin region. Centuries old, the recipe, a complicated mix of approximately 130 ingredients, was a carefully-guarded secret of the monastery-based brewers. |
Interestingly, the creator and manufacturer of La Raphaëlle, Hippolyte Bonal, had been a novice in the Carthusian monastery, where Chartreuse was made, but left before taking his final vows. He named his liqueur after the name he had planned to take as a monk, Raphaël. Bonal was not the only novice to run-off to the secular world with a monastery-held recipe for a liqueur. In January 1865, a former prior of the Grâce-Dieu Abbey in Bésançon, France, rejoined the secular world and began producing La Trappastine, a liqueur also similar to Chartreuse but produced, in this case, by the Grâce-Dieu Abbey. Rossetti’s artwork for La Raphaëlle might reference these historical events. In the poster, the French waiter unpleasantly surprised by an aerial thief, piloting a Wright Flyer-type aircraft, who has managed to rope the waiter’s bottle of the liqueur and is about to fly off with it, upsets the waiter’s tray and the waiter himself, while an amused Moon looks down on the robbery. Rossetti’s amusing imagery may also allude to another story of presumed cadging of intellectual property rights. Even after the various sources reported that Orville and Wilbur Wright had built and piloted a heavier-than-air craft of which they had full directional control, the French continued to disbelieve. Only when the Wrights flew their airplane above French soil for Frenchmen to see for themselves did the French concede. In 1908, the date of Wilbur Wright’s demonstration flight in France and this poster’s manufacture, the French admitted that the Americans had earned the right, like the poster’s pilot steals the bottle from right under the waiter’s nose, to claim they were the first to fly. |
|
|
|
|
