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Title: La Fine Redemptor
Description: It seems as if a crowd has just gathered to watch the exciting parachute drop of bottles of the alcoholic drink La Fine Redemptor by a good-spirited pilot flying through the poster’s frame. The poster indicates that the “La Fine Redemptor” drop takes place near Douai, a city in northern France, only a few miles from the Belgian border. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the city was noted for its major military foundries, its medieval architecture (which suffered during both world wars), and its cultural and scientific organizations. With access via both railroads and canals, Douai had extensive trade businesses, among which was a significant business in brandy. It was also a major coal region, and the factory in the poster’s background could easily be a reference to that industry, as well as the other manufacturing that brought income to the city. |
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The crowd of people appears well-to-do. The liquor-laden airplane seems to have interrupted some other event that had drawn such a large group to the countryside. The policeman holds back people at the front while more arrive from outside the frame of the scene. To the left of the poster, a young woman and man race from outside the frame of the poster into the crowd to get a better look. These people presumably were well-acquainted with Douai’s factories, which specialized in foundries producing cannons and other military materiel. The poster artist references the city’s factories—the steam and soot billow from the factory smokestacks in the background. While coal and large scale industry had brought belated prosperity to the Nord region of France, the poster suggests that the product “La Fine Redemptor” would bring a more refined salvation to the drinker’s life. Delivered by the newest of new technologies, the airplane, which compared to the smoking factory chimneys in the background, was a clean and elegant product of the industrial revolution. At least one other contemporary advertisement for “La Fine Redemptor” also employed airplane imagery. Artwork on a perforated adhesive label (akin to a postage-stamp) shows the beverage being dropped from an airplane, this time one similar to a Wright Flyer, the bottles fall over both Douai’s famous Gothic bell tower and the smoking chimneystacks of its industrialized areas. |
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