In 1880 Victoria, now sixty-one, was still queen of a prosperous England, her far- flung empire defended by a navy that made her the mistress of the seas. The Industrial Revolution, the force behind the nineteenth century’s unprecedented productivity, had made the world smaller with the invention of the steam locomotive and the development of railroads. Garfield, a Congressman in 1873, praised the railway as ‘the greatest centralizing force in modern times’.
While long journeys might be undertaken by train or steamship in the 1880s, local mobility depended on the feet, the horse, or, just possibly, the bicycle. The age of the two-wheeler had barely begun, but in 1896, when Will Owen was designing his famous posters for Victor, it was in full spin. Entertainment was concentrated mostly around the home.
| Will Owen’s famous posters for Victor |
The new craze, lawn tennis, was getting to be as popular as croquet, and party games were played as illustrated in Kate Greenaway’s ,Book of Games’ the queen of the 
nursery’s picture book of l889. More practical pastimes were sewing, knitting, carpentry, painting, and photography, especially after George" Eastman’s hand-held box camera came on the market in 1888. Taken together, hobbies amounted to big business. Even letter-writing, an art in Victorian days, used tons of notepaper, collectors of stamps and postcards used quantities of albums, and the piano, the focal point of the ‘withdrawingroom’, where the family sang, danced, and otherwise entertained, was also the sheet music publisher’s greatest delight.
New periodicals, including ‘The Ladies’ Home Journal’ and the original ‘Life’, a magazine of humour, both originating in 1883, kept springing up, and it was common for a novel first to be serialized in a magazine, then issued in book form later on. An older generation, brought up on Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, now read the younger novelists, such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Conan Doyle.
In the provinces few entertainments were looked forward to with such eagerness as the circus. The excitement began directly the bright Strobridge lithos were posted announcing the newest and ‘greatest show on earth’. In 1883 Buffalo Bill joined the competition with his Wild West spectacles. Road companies offered variety or vaudeville shows, burlesque, comedy, or the all-out farce, like Brandon Thomas‘s ever popular ‘Charley’s Aunt’. The full-blooded melodrama could also, pack the house; the success of one of these hero-heroine-villain shows usually being judged backstage not so much by the bravos and whistles the hero and the heroine received as by the loudness of the hisses, boos, and catcalls aimed at the villain.
A night out in the big city might mean seeing a play with Henry Irving or Ellen Terry in the lead, Ada Rehan, the Duse, or the ‘divine Sarah’. Music lovers might go to hear Bizet, Gounod, Verdi, Wagner, or perhaps a rollicking Gilbert and Sullivan at D’Oyly Carte’s new Savoy. Queen Victoria, an avid theatre-goer, loved to flit from play to play, sampling bits of several hits in a Single evening.
Front-page news revolved about the Millais-Pears affair. In 1886 Sir William Ingram bought John Everett Millais’ portrait of his young grandson, William James later to become a stern and bearded admiral-blowing bubbles with the object of reproducing the painting in his Illustrated London News. Sir William then sold the painting to Thomas Barratt, the manager of Pears, who saw what a wonderful poster it would make with a cake of soap added at the bottom. To the academic world this was a sacrilege, but the public so loved ‘Bubbles’ that the poster made advertising history as the sales of soap soared. John Guille Millais wrote perceptively in the biography of his father: “We ought to be grateful to Pears for their spirited departure from the track of advertisers. The example that they set has tended to raise the character of our illustrated advertisements, whether in papers or posters, and may possibly lead to the final extinction of such atrocious vulgarities as now offend the eye at every turn.” Pears was the first English company to realize the immense possibilities of prestige advertising; but Paris had been flowering her city walls with lithographic masterpieces for years.
As opposed to the man’s world of London, Paris was the centre of feminine fashions, indeed of femininity itself. Parisian night life of the belle époque was epitomized by the most famous of all nightclubs, the Moulin Rouge, and by the Folies-Bergere, both of which put on the gayest and naughtiest of revues with the greatest style. In keeping with the effervescent spirit of Paris were Jules Cheret’s sparkling posters of pretty girls, ‘Cherettes’ they were called, smiling, skating, dancing, or otherwise engaged (pages 18-19). A contemporary critic, Karl Huysman, wrote in 1880 that in his opinion there was “a thousand times more talent in the smallest of Cheret’s posters than in the majority of pictures on the walls of the Paris Salon.” This was as much a comment on the Salon as on Cheret, and must have pleased the impressionists, led by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Manet, who themselves had so long been ignored by the Salon.
| Two of Jules Cheret’s sparkling posters |
In Paris the response to Cheret influenced advertisers to engage other ‘serious’ artists to design posters, among them Alphonse Mucha, recently arrived from Austria, Swissborn Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec’s posters, the last designed in 1891, were not nearly so popular as Cheret’s. The earthier models, flat surfaces, strong outlines, and shadowless techniques of his lithographs-much influenced by Japanese prints and now so valued-were not pretty enough then for the public’s taste.
| Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec |
Theophile Alexandre Steinlen |
Aubrey Beardsley |
The golden age of the poster reached its height about 1895. At that time England’s distinguished designers included the Beggarstaffs, as the brothers-in-law James Pryde and William Nicholson were called, Dudley Hardy, Maurice Grieffenhagen, and Aubrey Beardsley, the twenty-two-year-old genius discovered by The Studio and featured in the magazine’s first issue in 1893
The year 1893 was also that of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, and the year too that Anton Dvorak composed his From the New World symphony. Posters had become the rage in America, and the enterprise of new magazines like Century, Harper’s, Lippincott, and The Chap-Book encouraged the talents of Will Bradley and Maxfield Parrish, both influenced by Beardsley.
Gallery showing ads 1880 – 1900
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Text from “The Art of ADVERTISING” by Bryan Holme
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