Decade
1890s ads
The best ads of the 1890s, from Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge and Mucha's JOB to Michelin's Bibendum: the decade the modern poster took shape.
All ads
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Nunc est bibendum!Michelin1898
Nunc est bibendum!
The birth of a mascot still working more than a century later.
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1896JOB
A cigarette-paper advert that fixed the look of Art Nouveau glamour.
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1896Rowntree's Elect Cocoa
Three words and almost nothing else.
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1893Divan Japonais
Hired by Édouard Fournier to fill his newly redecorated Montmartre café-concert, Toulouse-Lautrec advertised the Divan Japonais by advertising its…
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The Pickle PinHeinz1893
The Pickle Pin
At Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, H.
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1891Moulin Rouge – La Goulue
The poster that turned a dance hall's season launch into a street sensation.
Advertising in the 1890s
The 1890s entries are largely lithographic posters, made at the height of the poster boom, when better colour printing and looser bill-posting laws filled Paris with lithographs. Together they show the poster discovering what it could do.
Toulouse-Lautrec's first poster, Moulin Rouge – La Goulue, is studied as a founding moment of the modern poster: cropping, flat colour and radical simplification selling a night out at a glance. His Divan Japonais cut the singer Yvette Guilbert off at the neck, leaving viewers to recognise her by her long black gloves, and implied that stars who were not performing there might be seen there.
The decade's posters pull in different directions. Alphonse Mucha's JOB treated a cigarette-paper advert as a decorative canvas and fixed the look of Art Nouveau glamour. The Beggarstaffs' Rowntree's Elect Cocoa went the other way, stripping the poster down to silhouette and a few words and anticipating modernism by a decade.
Other entries point further ahead. Michelin's Nunc est bibendum built a figure out of tyres to turn a technical claim into a character, the mascot the company has kept ever since. And at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Heinz drew crowds up to a booth far from the big attractions with a free charm shaped like a pickle, the Pickle Pin that visitors wore home.