Collection: Vintage Ads & Posters

The vintage advertising poster, as a serious art object, dates from the late 1860s, when colour lithography reached the point where large multi colour images could be printed cheaply enough to paste on a wall. Within twenty years it had become the principal popular visual form in Paris, London, and New York, and a generation of artists chose it deliberately as their primary medium. The Belle Époque, Art Nouveau, and interwar Art Deco poster traditions all developed within this frame.

The Parisian poster of the 1880s and 1890s set the standard. Jules Chéret, working at Imprimerie Chaix, refined the colour lithograph into a vehicle for theatre, cabaret, and product advertising. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made it a vehicle for serious art with his Moulin Rouge and Aristide Bruant designs of 1891 and 1892, building on flat colour, asymmetric framing, and Japanese influence. Alphonse Mucha joined the field on 1 January 1895 with his Sarah Bernhardt poster for Gismonda and produced the most internationally diffused image of Art Nouveau commercial design.

The interwar period brought a different aesthetic. The French Affichistes, including Cassandre, Loupot, and Jean Carlu, used Cubist and Constructivist geometry to design transport, drinks, and tobacco posters with a graphic directness that influenced later twentieth century advertising worldwide. Tamara de Lempicka's Art Deco portraits and Maxfield Parrish's American magazine covers belong to the same broad commercial idiom of the period.

The prints gathered here include period stone lithographs, modern restrike editions, and high resolution facsimiles of canonical poster designs. The collection sits between the gallery's Art Nouveau & Belle Époque holdings, the period that established the poster as serious art, and the Art Deco & American Modernism selection, the interwar idiom that took it commercially worldwide.