About the work

In the late 1890s, a worldwide fascination with posters and poster artists erupted. Collectors loved these new posters—but their size made collecting them difficult. The Maitres de l’Affiche series was born of this problem. By offering subscribers reductions of the era’s most important posters, collectors and enthusiasts were able to build their own poster collections. The complete Maitres de l’Affiche series boasted 256 expertly produced miniature lithographic plates representing the best of the Belle Epoque. During its five-year run from late 1895 to 1900 the series was hugely successful. These lithographs continue to be popular today, attractive to both art collectors and regular people decorating their homes.

Les Maitres de l’Affiche was the brainchild of Jules Cheret. Cheret was the inventor of the three-stone lithographic process and the founder of the modern poster. As early as the 1860s, Cheret’s magnificent creations brought elegance and color to the urban landscape of Paris and soon generated an international industry. By 1866, Cheret opened his own print shop, which would eventually become a branch of the large French publisher Imprimerie Chaix. His role as artistic director at Chaix provided Cheret with the platform and resources necessary to launch the Maitres series.

The plates were released on a monthly basis beginning in December 1895 for sixty months, with a total of 240 regular plates and 16 bonus plates released. 97 artists from around the world were represented in the Maitres de l’Affiche series, with more than half of them French and nearly a quarter made by Cheret himself.

These posters proved to be central to the development of modern art, with works by artists like Cheret, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mucha transforming commercial advertisements into an esteemed art form.

The title of this work, in French, is Affiche pour le “Cacao Van Houten”. It was printed in 1893 by Lithographie Belfond et Cie, Paris, as an advertisement Van Houten’s cocoa powder. Van Houten was a Dutch chemist and chocolate maker known for the treatment of cocoa mass with alkaline salts to remove the bitter taste and make cocoa solids more water-soluble, giving rise to what is now called “Dutch process” cocoa.

This work is an original lithograph, printed in 1896, as part of the first volume of Maitres de l’Affiche. It is not a modern reproduction.

This lithograph is custom framed in a black-painted solid Ash wood frame behind 99% UF-filtering plexiglass and all conservation and archival materials.