SS Normandie - French Ocean Liner, Art Deco Masterpiece, 1935

When the SS Normandie slid down the slipway at Saint-Nazaire in 1932 and entered service in 1935, she was unlike anything the world had ever seen. Built for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique — the French Line — she was the largest, fastest, and most powerful passenger ship afloat, crossing the Atlantic in a record 4 days and 3 hours and claiming the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing.

But speed was only part of her story. The Normandie was above all a floating palace of Art Deco design — a showcase of French craftsmanship and luxury at its absolute peak. Her interiors were created by the greatest decorators of 1930s France: soaring grand staircases, walls of lacquered Algerian onyx, ceilings of Lalique glass, and a first-class dining room so vast it was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. To sail on the Normandie was to experience France at its most magnificent.

She was the pride of a nation — and her end was as sudden as it was heartbreaking. After the fall of France in 1940, she was seized in New York Harbor by American authorities. In February 1942, while being converted into a troopship following Pearl Harbor, a welder’s spark ignited a pile of life preservers. The fire spread with terrifying speed. Firefighters pumped so much water into her hull that she became top-heavy and capsized at her pier, rolling onto her side in the Hudson River. She never sailed again. The most beautiful ship in the world was sold for scrap in 1946.

A magnificent piece of French Art Deco poster art — a tribute to a ship that was, for a brief and glorious moment, the greatest ocean liner ever built.

Giclee reproductions on luster premium photo paper.