Hermann Scherrer: Breechesmaker, Sporting-Tailor

Why it works

A young rider in cap and waistcoat strides toward us with saddle and crop, a bulldog at his heel, and the loudest thing on the wall is his checked breeches. Ludwig Hohlwein's poster for Hermann Scherrer, a Munich maker of breeches and sporting clothes, builds the figure from bold flat planes of colour, so the cloth itself becomes the pattern that stops the eye. The Munich City Museum credits the Scherrer posters with Hohlwein's first big successes and says nearly all Munich product advertising came to follow his style; a 1926 monograph adds that English-language versions carried the campaign abroad and that the saddle-carrying horseman was copied as far afield as a Spanish sardine advertisement. It is studied as a key early Sachplakat, the German object poster that put the product at the centre. Hohlwein's later propaganda for the Nazi regime complicates his legacy, but this commercial series is what established his reputation.