Journal
The Found Poster Journal
Deep dives on single Belle Époque posters, surveys of the makers who built poster art, short histories of Art Nouveau and the cabaret era, and practical notes on printing and framing the work for a real room.
Matching poster color to your interior
The simplest way to make a poster look built-in rather than added-on is to pull one or two colours from the artwork and echo them in the room — a cushion, a wall, a bar stool. Work
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Deep dive: The Chap-Book. no. 11 (1896)
Elisha Brown Bird’s poster for The Chap-Book (1896) is a fine example of the American ‘little magazine’ poster at its decorative peak. Architecturally trained and steeped in the or
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Matting, borders and margins explained
A mat — the card border between a print and its frame — does more than fill space: it gives the image room to breathe, protects the paper, and makes a modest print look considered.
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Deep dive: Judge, will do! (1900)
Penrhyn Stanlaws’ cover for Judge, the American humour magazine, comes from a Scottish-born illustrator who became one of the best-known creators of the American ‘magazine girl’ —
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How to hang a gallery wall of posters
A gallery wall of posters works when it reads as one composition, not a scatter of frames. The reliable method is to treat the group as a single rectangle: lay it out on the floor
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Deep dive: Century Magazine – Midsummer Holiday Number (1894)
Louis Rhead’s poster for the Century Magazine’s 1894 Midsummer Holiday Number is a high point of the American magazine poster — flat decorative colour and strong outline in the man
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Posters for a yoga or pilates studio
For a yoga or pilates studio, the quiet end of Art Nouveau is the natural fit: Mucha’s flowing, graceful figures and the softer decorative posters of the Belle Époque, whose calm l
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Deep dive: Folly or saintliness (1895)
Ethel Reed’s 1895 poster Folly or Saintliness is the work of the first American woman to win real fame as a poster artist — and one of the era’s most intriguing lost figures. A Bos
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Posters for a hair salon
The natural wall art for a hair salon is Art Nouveau — above all Alphonse Mucha, whose flowing-haired women are the direct ancestors of modern beauty imagery. A salon is one of the
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Deep dive: La Dame aux Camélias (1896)
Alphonse Mucha’s 1896 poster for La Dame aux Camélias, made for Sarah Bernhardt, is pure ‘style Mucha’ — a tall, quiet panel of a woman haloed in stars and flowers, drawn in the fl
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Posters for a French bistro
A French bistro’s natural wall art is the poster art of its own culture: the café and cabaret scenes of Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec, the apéritif advertisements of Chéret and Cap
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Deep dive: Two Cats (1894)
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s Two Cats (1894) comes from the Montmartre artist who, more than any other, made the cat a fixture of Belle Époque art. A committed observer of workin
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Choosing posters for a cocktail bar
The right posters for a cocktail bar are the ones that invented its atmosphere: the Belle Époque cabaret and apéritif posters of 1890s Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret and Leo
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Deep dive: Casino de Paris (1891)
Jules Chéret’s 1891 poster for the Casino de Paris comes from the man who invented the modern colour poster. Two decades before Toulouse-Lautrec, Chéret had turned the Paris street
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Framing posters without glare
Glare is what makes a framed print look cheap in a bright room, and it has two cures: anti-reflective (‘museum’) glass, and placement that keeps the frame from facing a window or d
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Deep dive: The Chap-book / Will H. Bradley (1895)
Will Bradley’s posters for The Chap-Book in 1894–95 are American Art Nouveau at its boldest — sinuous black-and-white ornament advertising a small Chicago literary magazine. Self-t
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What size should you print a poster?
For a public room, 16×20 inches is the safe baseline and 24×36 the feature-wall size. But the right answer comes from three things: the resolution of your file, the wall and viewin
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Deep dive: Absinthe J. Édouard Pernot (1900)
Leonetto Cappiello’s 1900 poster for Absinthe J. Édouard Pernot is one of the founding images of modern advertising. Where the reigning master, Jules Chéret, filled his posters wit
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The best paper for art-print posters
The best paper for a vintage poster is an uncoated, acid-free matte fine-art stock of roughly 200–250 gsm, ideally with a slight tooth. It reproduces the flat, absorbent surface of
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Deep dive: Harper’s Magazine: Christmas (1897)
Edward Penfield’s cover poster for the Christmas 1897 Harper’s Magazine is a cornerstone of the American poster movement. As art director of Harper & Brothers through the 1890s
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How to print and frame a vintage poster
A vintage poster reproduces beautifully at home if you respect how it was originally made. These were large lithographs printed on uncoated paper, so they want a high-resolution fi
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Deep dive: Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891)
In the autumn of 1891 the Moulin Rouge commissioned a little-known 26-year-old aristocrat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, to design a poster for its star dancer, La Goulue. His first l
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