| Jules Chéret
(1836-1932), the man who was to exercise such a profound influence on is
trade, was born in Paris just about at the time when the first posters produced
by the lithographic process were being pasted on the billboards and vacant
walls around town. But they were still crude affairs, composed mostly of
large type and few border curlicues; lithography, although available as
a technique since 1798, was a slow, clumsy, extremely expensive method of
printing, economically impractical for posters. And, in fact, most at this
time were printed by metal or wood-block engravings, with some hand coloring
added for effect at times.
It was Chéret,
the lithographic innovator - he became a printer's apprentice at the age
of 13 - as well as the artistic and advertising genius, who formulated
the technical means to produce posters of every shading of the rainbow
with just three or four stones and thus, for the first time, made the
color pictorial poster an economically feasible marketing instrument.
Moreover, as the little magazine Poster Lore stated in 1896, "It
was not until Jules Chéret, the magician of the brush, began to
design his posters with their startling color effects and odd originality,
that poster designing attracted attention as a special branch of art."
Cheret created
numerous lithographic posters for The Moulin Rouge and for the people
who frequented the cabarets which represented the night life of Paris
at that time. He created posters for Yvette Guilbert at the Concert Parisien
which shows Yvette with her long black gloves, something she always wore.
You can see the long black gloves in Guilbert’s poster for her performance
in Kanjarowa at the Casino de Paris.
This would
later reveal him to be The Father of the Poster.
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