Charles Hiatt

“ It may be that men of rarer, of more fascinating, talent have now and again devoted themselves to the affiche; but none of them can compare with Chéret in the magnitude and curiosity of his achievement. Many have produced charming wall pictures: nobody, save Chéret, has made an emphatic mark on the aspect of a metropolis. Paris, without its Chérets, would be Paris without one of its most pronounced characteristics; Paris, moreover, with its gaiety of aspect materially diminished. ”

“ His first business is not to achieve a decoration, but to call the attention of the man in the street to the merits of an article. He may be fantastic only in so far as his fantasy assists the advertisement; he must ever keep before his eyes the narrow object of his effort. The closest limits are set to his invention; it is not for him to do what he will, but rather to do what he must. Under such circumstances, it is, at the first blush, somewhat surprising that artists have condescended to the poster at all. ”

“ The waterfall, splashing itself into luminous dust, the immense and silent mountains, the lakes which are seas, the vasty cañons which occur in different parts of the States, inevitably appeal to the imagination. It is therefore not wonderful that the great lines of America have preferred literal and exact illustration to fantastic delineation. The railways of France, on the other hand, have employed to no inconsiderable extent the artist to figure the beauties of the places at which they have stations. ”

“ By reason of a certain emphasis of colour and crudeness of design the art of Steinlen is admirably adapted to the production of such human documents. But it cannot be maintained that, whatever their technical merits, these studies of human misery are other than unpleasant—even painful. It is, therefore, altogether agreeable, when one turns to his essays in the art of the poster, to find his work graceful rather than tragic, urbane rather than mordant. Forsaking his mission of realistic illustration, he becomes gay, dainty, and fanciful as the best of his fellows. ”

“ Lautrec's productions, alluring and powerful as they are, can by no stretch of the word be so scribed. He does not seek to attract you by joyousness of colour or grace of pattern, but rather to compel your attention by the force of his realism or the curiosity of his grotesqueness. For his posters are at once realistic and grotesque; they are delineations of life as seen by a man who, possessing the most acute powers of observation, is poignantly impressed by the incongruities of modern life, the physical peculiarities of modern men. ”

“ The great masses of variegated colour formed by Chéret's posters greet one joyously as one passes every hoarding, smile at one from the walls of every café, arrest one before the windows of every kiosque. The merits of the Saxoléine lamp, the gaieties of the Moulin Rouge, the charms of Loie Fuller, the value of a particular brand of cough-lozenges, are insisted upon with a good-humoured vehemence of which Jules Chéret alone appears to know the secret. Others, in isolated cases, have possibly achieved more compelling decorations, but none can pretend to a success so uniform and so unequivocal. ”

“ Moreover, if he believe that art is something more than a vague grace, a non-essential luxury, he is ever anxious to extend her domain, to make her empire universal. He believes it to be his mission to touch some ugly necessity, to inform it with art, and, in doing so, to adorn it. He is restless for new worlds to conquer, for fresh fields to occupy. ”

“ Grieffenhagen, as a designer of posters, can only be judged by a single production. It may be said at once that nothing more distinguished, nothing which is less imitative or derivative, has come from English hands than Mr. Grieffenhagen's advertisement for the "Pall Mall Budget." Admirable alike in colour and in pattern, the poster is entirely appropriate to its purpose of keeping before the eyes of the public a publication which escaped frivolity on the one hand and dulness on the other. ”

“ And so it happens that he is willing, nay eager, to turn his attention to the poster, with the result that the hoarding becomes an interesting, even a charming, gallery of designs. What was one of the most hideous of human inventions is transformed into a delight to the eyes. Colour and interest are added to the street; the gay and joyous take the place of the dull and ugly. ”

“ It seems to me to be full of promise for the future that the hoarding should be among the first necessities of modern civilization to be rendered charming by the skill and imagination of the artist. Art is generally supposed to be inimical to commerce, and commerce inimical to art, yet here we have the two combining to the advantage of both, and succeeding in making the beautiful an incident of the necessary. ”

“ It is safe to say that, once seen, it will never be forgotten; it should have made the fortune of the performer whom it advertises. The mirth of the thing is victorious and infectious; one seems almost to hear the coarse laugh; the ample body in the green dress seems to move as one stares at it. In line, in movement, this poster is, from a certain point of view, a veritable masterpiece. An advertisement which is, it seems to me, altogether more worthy of Anquetin's great talent is one designed for "Le Rire," a recently issued journal. ”

“ It seems to me a specially interesting example of a remarkable talent applied to a very congenial subject. The posters of Lautrec are something more than works of art; they are human documents strangely eloquent of their moment. For this reason, their value may be more permanent than that of the productions either of Chéret or Grasset, delightfully fantastic as are the former, charmingly decorative as are the latter. ”

“ Hardy's posters is admirable. It is invented by the artist himself, and forms an essential part of the design. For the rest, it should be remembered that the poster is a mere incident in Mr. Hardy's art career. As an illustrator he is with us everywhere; as a painter he is held in deserved esteem. It is to be hoped, for the sake of the artistic poster in England, that he will continue to devote some of his time to a branch of art in which, in comparatively a short time, he has so greatly succeeded. ”

“ In the sweet uses of advertisement the American is surely an expert, and it would have been curious indeed, if he had overlooked so obvious and so effective a method of advertising as the pictorial poster. ”

“ The fact that men so highly endowed as Chéret and Lautrec deliberately choose to appeal to the public chiefly by means of the affiche, well knowing that their gallery is the common hoarding, places the illustrated poster outside the bounds of ridicule. A modern art critic of high repute and of enormous energy has assured us that, in these days, to neglect the poster is mere folly on the part of those who care for the application of taste and skill to the objects of everyday life. ”

“ In this design, one of the prettiest and most delightful little ladies in the whole Monvel gallery of pretty little ladies insists on the merit of the tooth-paste which, if it be half as good as she is charming, must be excellent indeed. Every artist knows his own business best, but one can only hope that, in what leisure he can snatch from his work in paint and illustration, Boutet de Monvel will place the collector of posters under new obligations to him. ”

“ The old theatrical poster represented, in glaring colours, the hero in a supreme moment of exaltation, or the heroine in the depths of despair. Mr. Beardsley did not condescend to illustrate, but produced a design, irrelevant and tantalizing to the average man, though doubtless full of significance to himself. In many respects the Avenue bill must be considered the best poster which so far has come from this artist's hands. The very graceful figure on a small poster for "The Yellow Book" speaks for itself. ”

“ Prominent among the French designers of posters with whom I have not previously dealt is Guillaume, an artist widely known in England by reason of the admirable illustrations which, from time to time, appear in our periodicals. Save Chéret and Choubrac, few artists have done so much poster work as Guillaume, and not many have maintained so high a level of accomplishment. Vigour, vivacity, and high spirits, rather than beautiful design and fine colour, are the characteristic qualities of posters by Guillaume. ”

“ Pryde and Simpson, two young artists, are entitled to the first place among the makers of the English artistic poster. They have best appreciated the essence of their business: less than almost any native designers, they are innocent of any homage of imitation. They have imitated neither Chéret nor Lautrec: it may well be that they have had the wisdom to take a hint here and there from both of these masters of the art of the affiche. As yet the hoardings of London are screaming with the vulgar designs of the advertiser's hack. ”

“ Not infrequently some incident is depicted with frank realism. A bull standing over a dead horse gives an opportunity to the artist to draw the unfortunate horse disembowelled and lying on blood-stained sand, while the bull's hide shows the marks of the lance-thrusts, and his horns are likewise stained with blood. Colour-printing is so good in these regions of perpetual sunlight that nearly every detail of a matador's costume can be given. The poster artists are splendid when they depict ”

“ He depicts life from no sentimental point of view; he can be realistic without seeming to appreciate the tragedy which is of the very essence of realism, so that on seeing one of his illustrations of modern life, one receives, apart from technical delight, a distinctly literary impression. Of his posters, perhaps the earliest is one unsigned and without lettering, representing an illuminated garden, in which a woman is depicted in the midst of an explosion of fireworks. Subsequent to this comes a bill to advertise one of the novels of Dubut de Laforest, which bears the artist's signature. ”

“ Whether it be good or bad, the extraordinary impression it has made cannot be gainsaid. It is probable that the work of no young designer of recent times has called forth so much homage of imitation, so great an amount of that kind of caricature which is among the sincerest forms of flattery. Mr. Beardsley's eccentricities are so pronounced, that to parody his work was simply to do the obvious. ”

“ They are at once striking and artistic; they cry their wares well, and they are a delight to the eyes. The lettering in the Harper poster is beyond all praise. Of its kind, it is the most beautiful English lettering of which I know. At the Aquarium Exhibition the Beggarstaff’s showed four posters which advertised Nobody's Blue, Nobody's Candles, Nobody's Niggers, and Nobody's Pianos. If each "Nobody" is not rapidly converted into "Somebody," the various manufacturers and proprietors of the articles mentioned above must be very stupid people. ”

“ THE POSTER IN FRANCE: THE WORK OF WILLETTE, FORAIN, STEINLEN, ANQUETIN, BONNARD, IBELS, VALLOTON, DE FEURE, AND MÉTIVET.
It is not for a moment to be pretended that the artists with whom this chapter deals are in any sense members of a single school: they have, indeed, many more points of difference than of similarity. I deal with them together, because, speaking roughly, their designs are saturated with the spirit of the day: their decorations are realistic, rather than fantastic or picturesque. ”

“ The art of Ibels is as little comprised in the poster as that of Steinlen. It is happily characteristic of young artists of the present day, both here and in France, that painting is not the only god of their æsthetic adoration: they experiment in many mediums, and it is really remarkable in how great a number of such experiments they succeed. ”

“ Not content with having his name inscribed in gigantic letters, he went a step further, and anticipated the illustrated affiche. Just as Sarah Bernhardt employs the decorative skill of Grasset to depict her as Joan of Arc, so did the old Roman actor employ Callades, an artist mentioned very favourably by Pliny, to portray him in his favourite parts. Callades would seem to have been the Chéret of his age: he was the great artistic advertiser of ancient Rome, just as Chéret is the great artistic advertiser of modern Paris. ”