Treca Pullman

There is something irresistibly comic about Savignac’s vision: a plump, blissfully sleeping sheep curled up on a Treca Pullman mattress, its woolly fleece the living proof of the product’s promise. In a single image, the poster collapses the distance between raw material and finished comfort — the same animal that gives its wool to the mattress is the one sleeping most soundly on it. It is the kind of visual wit that made Savignac the undisputed master of post-war French commercial art.

Executed in his signature flat planes of saturated colour and bold, economical line, this four-sheet billboard was designed for the grandest scale of public display — the format of Paris metro station advertising panels, where Savignac’s compositions were meant to stop commuters in their tracks.

At over three metres tall and nearly two-and-a-half metres wide, it fills a room the way it once filled a wall. Printed in 1954 by Imprimerie Courbet in Paris, linen-backed and in near-mint condition, this is almost certainly the only surviving example of this format — a once-in-a-generation find for any serious collector of French graphic art.

This piece is sold unframed, carefully rolled and shipped in a rigid tube to ensure it arrives in pristine condition.