Collection: Vintage Ads & Posters

Vintage advertising posters cover the popular printed graphics produced from the late 1860s through to the mid-twentieth century, the period when colour stone lithography and, later, offset printing made high-quality multi-colour images commercially available at large scale. The technical foundation came from Alois Senefelder's invention of lithography in 1796, but the medium became commercially dominant only after Jules Chéret refined a fast multi-colour stone process at the Imprimerie Chaix in Paris from the late 1860s. Chéret produced over a thousand poster designs across his career and is regarded as the founder of the modern advertising poster.

The Belle Époque, between roughly 1880 and 1914, was the medium's first golden age. The lithographic poster turned the streets of Paris, London, and New York into what one period observer called the poor man's picture gallery. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made the form serious art with his Moulin Rouge, La Goulue poster of 1891 and the Aristide Bruant designs of 1892. Alphonse Mucha joined the field on 1 January 1895 with his Sarah Bernhardt poster for Gismonda, opening Art Nouveau as the dominant decorative idiom for poster work over the next decade.

The interwar period produced a second golden age in the work of the French Affichistes. Cassandre, Charles Loupot, Jean Carlu, and Paul Colin developed an Art Deco geometric idiom for railway, ocean liner, and product advertising. Cassandre's posters for the SNCF, the Normandie, and Dubonnet remain the canonical examples of the period.

The medium declined after the Second World War with the rise of magazine, radio, and television advertising, but the 1960s counterculture sparked a revival in poster as political and self-expressive form. The principal sub-movements include Belle Époque posters, Art Deco posters, lithographic posters, and the work of the Affichistes.