For any car artist the opportunity to even visit the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is something that is keenly anticipated and much cherished. But what most ambitious car artists truly dream of is the opportunity to one day paint the highly prestigious promotional poster. For the 59th Annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the lucky artist was AFAS member Barry Rowe. Rowe, whose involvement with Concours posters stretches back 12 years, was delighted to be given the opportunity to create a poster concentrating on the Bentley Vanden Plas, a car he described as “visually interesting”.

The Pebble Beach event, held on August 16 last, was this year themed heavily around the Bentley, and saw the first appearance of Bentley’s 2010 Mulsanne model, a car of such refinement that it is almost certain to feature in car art prints almost from the moment it starts rolling off production lines next year. Concours chairman Sandra Button said, on announcing Barry Rowe’s commission to paint this year’s poster, that the finest automobiles were “art on wheels”. The first Mulsanne in production was auctioned at this year’s Concours, and fetched a winning bid of $550,000 – which is not as much as some works of art have managed to pick up, but still a fairly impressive haul nonetheless.

With next year’s Concours d’Elegance to be held on August 15th, the top echelon of car artists will be holding their breath all over again to see if they will get the chance to follow Rowe.