This original travel poster from the Air France Far-east series dates from 1950 and was printed as a lithography by Alépée & Cie and designed by Vincent Guerra. Amid troubled times - 4 years prior to the independence of Indochina - the French airlines was still flying to Saïgon, now Ho Chi Minh City. The rustic setting shows a remote corner of the bay of Indochina with typical colonial-era fishing basket boats - more modest than the traditional junk style or sewn boats - above which flies a Lockheed Constellation aircraft. The various shades of watery green that lighten up the vintage picture paint a dreamlike landscape, a peaceful setting which in reality contrasted very much with the turmoil of the time. Between 1946 and 1954, Vincent Guerra designed twenty five posters for Air France. Amusingly, during his first drafts of the Africa series in 1946 the artist mistakenly painted Asian elephants instead of African elephants.