The Poster.

£1,040 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Important fin-de-siecle journal with original colour lithographs by William Nicholson and James Pryde (“The Beggarstaff Brothers), Jules Cheret, Henri Privat Livemont, and Albert Morrow, among others. The Poster , the first journal devoted to its subject to be published in England, was at the nexus of several currents: aesthetic, technological and financial. At a time when developments in colour lithography had made posters easier to produce, and a wider range of consumer goods gave rise to new ways of marketing, commercial developments made advertising more desirable – and The Poster fostered a belief that such art deserved more than passing engagement. Here, as across Europe in the late nineteenth century, the advent of the illustrated poster was accompanied by claims for the medium’s potential artistic sophistication and seriousness; as John Hewitt has described, the journal showcased the idea of a poster as ‘an original and creative act of a talented individual’. Readers of The Poster would have been alerted to important visual trends in poster art – in mainland Europe, North America and Canada as well as Great Britain – and correspondents wrote in for advice on how to collect and preserve posters, belying the notion that they were an ephemeral medium. If The Poster was short-lived, it was also influential: both as a means of taste-making, and as a journal of record. Its regular features of “Palette Scrapings”, “The Hoardings” and “Rejected Sketches” are particularly inte

• Year: 1898

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.