Belle Epoque Lithograph

This is the moment the poster became an advertising medium. Cheret worked out that one big figure having a good time sells a night out, and nobody has improved on it.

The crayon texture keeps it warm. It is flat colour that still looks handmade, which is a combination most modern styles cannot manage.

One figure, large, caught mid-step, mid-dance or mid-laugh, filling most of the sheet. Limbs cropped by the edge are fine.

Colour is flat but textured: lithographic crayon grain, spatter and visible stone tooth. Three or four inks and the paper.

Lettering is hand drawn, loose, and wraps around the figure rather than sitting in a box. The background stays plain, often a single flat colour.

Use it for a cabaret, a dance, a circus, a drinks launch, a summer ball, a fundraiser with performance in it.

Leave it alone for a serious or technical subject. The style is relentlessly cheerful.

Art Nouveau is the ornamental branch of the same decade, with the whiplash line and the floral arch. Belle Epoque is looser and more commercial.

Golden Age travel posters are thirty years later, with airbrushed flat colour and a place rather than a person.

Toulouse-Lautrec sits between the two, flatter and more graphic than Cheret.

Jules Cheret printed over a thousand of these from 1866 and the dancing women became known as Cherettes. Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge: La Goulue of 1891 took the same format and flattened it further, and the Paris streets of the 1890s were the gallery.

The model returns a detailed painted illustration. Ask for flat lithographic colour with crayon texture and visible stone grain, only three or four inks.

The second failure is a static pose. Say the figure is caught mid-movement, with limbs cropped by the edge of the sheet.