Studio: international art (1.1893)

The Collecting of Posters

white on behalf of one of the illustrated magazines,
Mr. Linley Sambourne's poster for a forthcoming
periodical, are alike only in their complete failure to
arrest the attention of the spectator. With Cheret

A POSTER. BY CH£RET

all is different, for his designs fairly cry aloud for
recognition. His splendidly audacious colour and
broad execution rarely fail to bring the man in the
street to a standstill. He recognises that to lavish

high finish on a poster to be looked at from a
distance of some yards is as futile as to hang a
Gerard Dow below the weather-cock on a church
tower. It is truly amazing that Cheret can reduce
intense indigo, burning crimson, glowing green and
yellow, in fact all the hottest colours on the palette,
into broad harmony. So complete is his mastery,
that he sometimes achieves effects which, even it
seen close to, are positively pretty. His master-
piece in this direction is perhaps his charming
Pantomimes Lumincuses, in which a short-skirted girl
in yellow spotted with rose is placed on an intense
indigo background amidst quite a little shower of
chrysanthemums. The picture comprises other
figures and a wealth of picturesque detail, all of
which inevitably lead up to the yellow girl.

But if it is the colour of Cheret which at first
strikes one in looking over a series of his posters,
the charm of his design is not for a moment likely
to be overlooked. The richness of his personality
and the originality of his style can be recognised
even in the fragments of some of his works repro-
duced here. The translation of a Cheret into black
and white is at best unsatisfactory, and loses half
the effect of the original, and yet, compared with
the average English illustration, how charming even
these little things appear, robbed though they are
of their victorious colour ! Perhaps Cheret's won-
derful gaiety is his most pronounced characteristic :
each of his posters is an explosion of mirth. His
best work deals with the gayest subjects, and when
he is representing a chattering crowd of pantomi-
mists, "a cascade of clowns," a sprightly dancing
girl, he is in his element and his gift of vivacity has
the fullest play. But his work for railway companies,
for patent medicines, for picture galleries, for book-
sellers, is all such as he only could accomplish. He
could advertise everything under the sun, save
perhaps a suicide club, or an undertaker's business.
His versatility within narrow limits is immense,
although it must be confessed that those limits
make a great mass of his work seen at one time
somewhat monotonous. The piquant girl of Che'ret,
whether in red or yellow, in long or short skirts, is
no more likely to go unrecognised than the
enamoured* lady of Mr. Marcus Stone. The
beauty of his designs, too, is considerably dis-
counted by the clumsy way the lettering is
managed, which looks as if it had been added as
an afterthought by a stupid machine printer. But
in spite of slight defects Cheret's work amply
deserves Huysman's description of it as unedhiette
d'art exqnise. If in the designing of modern
posters Jules Cheret is incontestably first, it would

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