CHÉRET, Jules

French lithographer, poster designer and painter. Chéret’s formal training in art was limited to a course at the Ecole Nationale de Dessin, Paris, as a pupil of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1802-1897). More important for his future as a poster artist were his apprenticeships with lithographers from the age of 13. He created his first poster, Orpheus in the Underworld, for the composer Jacques Offenbach in 1858; this, however, did not lead to further commissions, and he went to London where he designed book covers for the publishing firm of Cramer as well as several posters for the circus, theatre and music halls. These efforts led him to work for the perfume manufacturer Eugène Rimmel, who in 1866 supported Chéret’s establishment of a commercial colour lithographic shop in Paris.

First working in one or two colours, in 1869 Chéret introduced a new system of printing from three stones: one black, one red and the third a ‘fond gradué’ (graduated background, achieved by printing two colours from one stone, with cool colours at the top and warm colours at the bottom). This process was the basis of his colour lithographic posters throughout the 1870s and early 1880s; later, when the format of posters had grown to life-size, his colour schemes became much more elaborate and varied. By 1881 his work had become so popular, and he had become so financially successful, that he was able to transfer the responsibility of his shop to Chaix & Company while maintaining artistic control.

Chéret’s reputation as the father of the colour lithographic poster was grounded in his innovative use of lithography for posters. He created over a thousand poster designs promoting a great variety of products, performances, theatres, nightclubs, journals, exhibitions and books, as well as lithographic book covers, illustrations and, in 1891, four works described as decorative posters, which advertised no products but were framed and hung like paintings. Among his most important early works are the poster produced in 1874 for the dance hall Frascati (his first large-scale work) and Les Girard (1877), whose integration of text with image makes it one of the most stylistically advanced posters of the 19th century. His posters of the 1890s include Saxoléine and Palais de Glace, both of which typify Chéret’s romantic vision of fin-de-siècle women (the ‘chérettes’, as they came to be called), while Bal au Moulin Rouge (1889) and Loie Fuller (1893) precede and relate directly to the same subjects of his younger colleague Toulouse-Lautrec.

While Chéret’s greatest contribution is in poster art, he also produced paintings, pastels and murals. From 1898 he worked on murals for the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (completed in 1903). Chéret’s murals, like his posters, reveal the strong influence of the Rococo aesthetics of Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard and the paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo. It was this 18th-century style that separated Chéret from his younger colleagues; nevertheless, his influence on them in subject matter, in medium and in the use of art within the advertising world was substantial. He inspired a younger generation of artists, including among many others Pierre Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Alphonse Mucha, to create posters in the 1890s.