CHAPTER III.—IN FRANCE. THE WORK OF CHÉRET, GRASSET, AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
So many contemporary French artists are designing posters, that a single chapter dealing with them all would be of an alarming length. I have therefore, in the first place, separated from their fellows three who seem to me curiously individual and worthy of careful consideration. Of the men whose names head this chapter, pre-eminence is due, for various reasons, to Jules Chéret, whose position, in the matter of poster-designing, is quite without parallel.
It may be that men of rarer, of more fascinating, talent have now and again devoted themselves to the affiche; but none of them can compare with Chéret in the magnitude and curiosity of his achievement. Many have produced charming wall pictures: nobody, save Chéret, has made an emphatic mark on the aspect of a metropolis. Paris, without its Chérets, would be Paris without one of its most pronounced characteristics; Paris, moreover, with its gaiety of aspect materially diminished. The great masses of variegated colour formed by Chéret's posters greet one joyously as one passes every hoarding, smile at one from the walls of every café, arrest one before the windows of every kiosque. The merits of the Saxoléine lamp, the gaieties of the Moulin Rouge, the charms of Loie Fuller, the value of a particular brand of cough-lozenges, are insisted upon with a good-humoured vehemence of which Jules Chéret alone appears to know the secret. Others, in isolated cases, have possibly achieved more compelling decorations, but none can pretend to a success so uniform and so unequivocal. Few men as richly endowed with the gift of decoration would! have been content to produce work which, were it not for the portfolio of the collector, would be of an entirely ephemeral character. It must be irritating to the artist to watch the gradual destruction of his chefs-d'oeuvre, condemned as they are to be torn by every wind, soaked by every shower, blistered by the sun, blurred by the fog. It is natural that he should turn his eyes longingly to the comparative permanence of canvas, marble, or bronze; and it says much for Chéret's confidence in his artistic mission for his nice realization of his possibilities and limitations that he has remained faithful to the affiche for over twenty years. Now and
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again, it is true, he has turned aside to do work of more universally recognized and more pretentious a character, and the very fact that he has touched scarcely anything which he has not adorned, emphasises his fidelity to a branch of art until quite recently despised and held of little moment. It is, indeed, mainly owing to this devotion, to this lavish expense of talent, that the poster is not even now considered beneath the dignity of the collector. The judicious, as soon as their eyes fell upon Chéret's vast lithographs, decided that he was no mere colour-printer's hack, but an artist whose work would have to be reckoned with. There was something positively alluring in the spectacle of a man who calmly placed his gift at the disposal of the tradesman, who accepted without murmur the limitations which the tradesman imposed upon him. It is possible that, had it not been for the circumstances of his life, the streets of Paris would have remained undecorated, so far as Chéret was concerned, to this day. Commencing as the humblest of lithographers, Chéret did not take up art of set intention, but passed irresistibly, though it may be unconsciously, into it. After long years of patient and tedious work as an ordinary lithographer, at the dawn of the year 1866, he commenced what was destined to be the most notable series of pictorial posters in existence, a series containing over a thousand items, and one which happily has yet to close. It is doubtless the conditions of his early life, the lessons learned while under the yoke of trade, that have enabled Chéret to appreciate to the full that the first business of an advertisement is to advertise. Avoiding, therefore, all subtle harmonies, he goes in for contrasts of colour, violent, it is true, but victorious in their very violence. Blazing reds, hard blues, glowing yellows, uncompromising greens, are flung together, apparently haphazard, but in reality after the nicest calculation, with the result that the great pictures, when on the hoardings, insist positively on recognition. One might as well attempt to ignore a fall of golden rain, as to avoid stopping to look at them; they are so many riots of colour, triumphant in their certainty of fascinating and bewildering the passerby.