E. GRASSET. Some of the keenest critics of Paris have joined in praise of M. Chéret's pictures, though they were merely decorative sketches, doomed to destruction by the first rainstorm, and produced to the order of any chance advertiser who had wares to vend. Some of the most prominent writers on the Parisian newspapers have thanked M. Chéret that he has enlivened the dull gray walls of Paris by lightly draped and merrily dancing figures, giving a suggestion of life and warmth to the wintry streets of the French capital. These aërial bodies, with their diaphanous drapery and their swift movement, suggest the figures frescoed on the walls of Pompeii; and M. Chéret is not without his share of the Latin ease and verve which forever fixed these Pompeian girls as a joy to the world. He has also the bold stroke of the Japanese artist, and he has, moreover, the Japanese faculty of suppressing needless details: for there is never any niggling, any finicky cross-hatching, any uncertainty, in M. Chéret's work. He is an impressionist in one sense of the word-an impressionist who has a masterly command of line and an absolute control of color, and who uses these to make you perceive what has impressed him. The figure he sketches may be as saucy as you please, but there is no slouch about the composition. To describe his work adequately we must needs, as M. Henry Lavedan suggested, borrow from this decorator certain of his own colors, a lemon-yellow, and a geranium-red, and a midnight blue; and even then we should lack the cunning of the artist so to juxtapose these as to reproduce his effects. Almost equally difficult is it to reproduce in a magazine what is most representative in M. Chéret's work; for above all else is he a colorist, and the attempt to translate his work into the From collection of George B. De Forest. (28 x 45%1⁄2 inches.) for the Porte Saint Martin fairy play, the "Biche au Bois" (in which Mme. Sara Bernhardt was acting for a season in 1867 while the freak was on her); and since 1867 M. Chéret has produced three or four hundred posters for theaters, circuses, music-halls, char-, ity fêtes, newspapers, and publishers; and he has slowly gained a perfect mastery over his material, until now he can bend to his bidding the stubborn lithographic stone. With the years, and with constant practice, his style has grown firmer, and his pencil has now a larger sweep. With the years, too, has come recognition of his work, and he knows now that what he does is appreciated by those who take thought about the things which surround them. monochrome of typography is little less than a betrayal. The compact and skilful composition can be shown, and the force of the drawings; but the effort to transfer the charm of the color is foredoomed to failure. posters, the masterly composition which advertised the striking pantomime of MM. Carré and Wormser, "L'Enfant Prodigue." M. Willette has made a specialty of Pierrot; and indeed the revival of interest in that French type of pantomimic personage is due partly to his pencil, so that it would have been out of keeping had any one but he prepared the poster for the play of which the prodigal Pierrot was the hero. LIBRAIRIE ROMANTIQUE In his earlier posters M. Chéret turned to advantage the old lithographic device of shading off the color of the background stone so that, for example, it might print at once the dark blue of the sky at the top and the dark brown of the foreground at the bottom. Of this sort are the posters for Hervé's "Petit Faust," for Miss Lydia Thompson's "Faust," and for the Valentino dance-hall, all reproduced in M. Maindron's book. Later came posters in which this gradation of tint was abandoned in favor of a sharp contrast of color, with the legend aggressively detached in white on the chromatic background. Of this sort are the "Tertullia, Café Spectacle," the "Concert des Ambassadeurs, Fête des Mitrons," and the incomparably vivid and vigorous poster for M. Robida's "Rabelais"; and these also may be found in M. Maindron's invaluable volume. Of this sort also is the advertisement of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" reproduced herewith. Since the appearance of M. Maindron's monograph, M. Chéret has developed a third style by simplifying his palette; with an artful combination of red and yellow and blue, he achieves a chromatic harmony which is the despair of the engraver who must confine himself perforce to black and white. Of this sort are the "Coulisses de l'Opéra" done for the Musée Grévin, the flamboyant figure which served to advertise the print-shop of M. Sagot, and the dream of happy children who got their toys at the Louvre last Christmas. E. GRASSET. M. Chéret's methods are all his own, and it would be madness for any hand less skilful than his to attempt to utilize them. Fortunately, therefore, he has not been imitated by M. Willette or by M. Grasset, the two contemporary French artists who come closest to him. M. Willette indeed confines himself wholly to monochrome, to the single impression of black ink on white paper; and it is therefore easy to reproduce here one of his most characteristic From collection of Richard Hoe Lawrence. (33 X 49 inches.) M. Grasset is a colorist, as M. Chéret is, but he is more complex in his style, and he prefers a Byzantine richness, as in his "Jeanne Darc." He put on paper a superbly vigorous cavalier trumpeting forth the "Fêtes de Paris"; and he has lately prepared a soft and gentle poster on the "Sud de France," enticing the chilly Parisian to the land of the olive and myrtle. So subdued and languorous is the color-scheme of this last piece that its charm. is almost as difficult to render in black and white as is the fascination of M. Chéret's riot D PENEA. ers, chiefly railroad advertisements, having a quality of their own, a national note, perhaps best to be characterized as a broad richness of color not unlike that to which we are accustomed in Roman scarfs and Bellagio rugs. In the brilliancy of some of these posters I thought I detected the influence of the little group of Hispano-Roman painters; and I noted also the decorative methods of the lithographic designers who have devised the showy but not inartistic covers for the sheet-music issued by the Milanese publisher, Signor Ricordi. M. Maindron declares that Signor Simonetti, the water-colorist, is to be credited with the elaborate posters announcing the Exposition of Turin some six or seven years ago. Something of this Italian richness is to be found in Spanish bull-fight advertisements. As to contemporary German work, M. Maindron is silent, as becomes a patriotic Frenchman; but there is little in contemporary German art which should give a patriotic Frenchman a thrill of envy. I have seen no German posters which compare with the finer French work, nor any which have the brio and swing of some of the Italian. For the most part the German posters are hard and dull; even when they are learned and scholarly, they are academic and frigid. In the single-sheet bill advertising an exhibition of fans at Karlsruhe in the summer of 1891, there was an ingenious combination of red and black; and a poster made for the Munich exhibition of the same summer, and representing a stately winged figure of Art advancing solemnly in a chariot drawn by two stalwart steeds, was not without a certain twilight harmony of tone. From collection of Richard Hoe Lawrence. (49% × 99 inches.) ous tints; but its emblematic decoration is too ingeniously combined to allow me to pass it over in silence. Even this is less characteristic than his "Librairie Romantique," done in the very spirit of 1830. And it is M. Grasset's stained-glass manner which M. Carloz Schwabe has imitated in his "Salon Rose Croix." Any one who spends even twenty-four hours in Italy-as it was my good fortune to do a year ago - must observe not a few Italian postVOL. XLIV.-98. British art is as lifeless as Teutonic; the triviality of most of it, and its dominant note of domesticity, are to be observed also in its posters, which are devoted chiefly to things to eat, and to things to drink, and to things for household use. The brutal vulgarity of a London railway terminus, foul with smoke, is emphasized by the offensive harshness of the posters stuck upon its walls, with no sense of fitness and no attempt at arrangement. Bariolé and criard are the epithets a French art-critic would inevitably apply to the most of these advertising placards. Oddly enough, the poster is still outside the current of decorative endeavor which has given us the Morris wall-papers, the Doulton tiles, the Walter Crane book-covers, and the Cobden Sanderson bindings. So it happens that one sees in Great Britain but little mural decoration of this sort which is not painfully unpleasant. Even when the advertiser seems to have taken thought and spent money, his effort is misdirected more often than not. Thus a firm of soap-makers has plastered up all over London, and in a printed gilt frame, an elaborate chromolithographic facsimile of an oil-painting by Sir John Millais,called "Bubbles," of which the merits, such as they are, are purely pictorial and in no wise decorative. As a great price was paid for the painting, and as the reproduction was obviously costly, attention was no doubt attracted to the soap-makers, and so the purpose of the advertisement was attained; but no artistic interest was subserved. The same firm of advertisers was far better advised when it procured from Mr. H. Stacy Marks a single black-and-white sketch showing two monks washing themselves with the soap to which attention was to be attracted. Thus it is in Great Britain, in matters of art, good work is ever sporadic. There is no healthy organization and no steady development in England as there is in France; individual posters may be commonplace or distinguished or ugly, as luck will have it; and one suspects that public opinion rather resents than welcomes the stronger effort. Besides his poster for the soap-maker, Mr. Marks did two of his quaint birds in black and white, for the backs of the sandwichmen who were calling the attention of the public to a collection of his works on exhibition at the Fine Art Society's galleries. For a similar occasion Mr. Walter Crane made one of his delightful decorative designs. For his exhibition of From collection of George B. De Forest. (30% x 69% inches.) "Life and Work in Bavaria's Alps" at the same gallery, Professor Hubert Herkomer also prepared a poster in black and white. But Professor Herkomer's most ambitious composition is the huge eight-sheet poster he designed in 1881 to announce the starting of the "Magazine of Art." Ten years later Professor Herkomer made another poster, more unpretending, for "Black and White." These posters of Professor Herkomer were all woodcuts to be printed in black; and so were the posters made by Mr. E. J. Poynter for an insurance company, and the poster made by the late Frederick Walker for the dramatization of the "Woman in White"a single female figure of dignity and power. And the American posters of the last generation were all woodcuts. It was in the United States, indeed, that the art of color-printing from a set of pine blocks had been carried to American circus in Paris during the Exposition of 1867, that opened M. Chéret's eyes to the possibilities of this department of decorative art. Probably again it was an echo of M. Chéret's success in Paris which waked up the American printers, and led to the substitution of the softer lithographic stone for the harsh wood block. This substitution was made about ten years ago by the Strobridge Company of Cincinnati, a city to which we already owed the ad LITHOGRAPHED BY FRIEDRICH GUTSCH, KARLSRUHE. an extreme. This polychromatic printing, of which the circus poster of a dozen years ago was a favorable specimen, was not without a rough effect, although it was hopelessly unattractive when considered seriously. American show-printing revealed much mechanical dexterity, but little or no knowledge of the principles of design, although I can recall more than one of these ruder posters not without merit. The one which I most readily remember advertised Mr. Augustin Daly's drama, "Divorce," and its central figure was a Cupid weeping within a broken wedding-ring. Probably it was the rather startling, and somewhat violent, American posters, hard and dry woodcuts all of them, which proclaimed the advent of an From collection of Brander Matthews. (28% x 341⁄2 inches.) mirable Rookwood pottery; and the credit of the change is probably due to the late Matt Morgan, an English draftsman of great fertility and abundant fancy. Having caricatured the Prince of Wales in the "Tomahawk," he had come to this country to caricature General Grant in "Frank Leslie's." As a caricaturist he labored under one great disadvantage; he could never draw any but a cockney face; his Irishmen and his negroes, do what he might, were always Englishmen made up for the character: no man may step off his shadow. But Morgan was an accomplished designer with at fine sense for color, as he had shown in England by his scenery for Covent Garden pantomimes. Here in the United States he had come |