The Master Poster Designers

Often called the father of the modern colour poster.

Chéret turned the street into a gallery. Using colour lithography to print vivid, sweeping scenes of dancers, performers and products, he gave Belle Époque Paris its first great advertising art — and made the poster respectable as an art form in its own right.

One of the first to sell destinations as dreams.

Born Frédéric Alexianu in Transylvania and working in Paris, d'Alesi made his name in the 1890s with tourist posters for French railways, selling the coast, the mountains and the spa towns to a new class of leisure traveller. Bright, precise and richly coloured, they set the pattern for the travel poster.

The painter of Montmartre, its cats and its streets.

Swiss-born Steinlen settled in Montmartre in 1881 and became the quarter's most beloved illustrator. His poster for the Chat Noir cabaret tour, with its defiant black cat, is one of the most recognisable images of 1890s Paris.

The face of Art Nouveau, though he disliked the label.

In 1894 a last-minute commission to advertise a play starring Sarah Bernhardt made the Moravian-born Mucha famous overnight. His tall, graceful panels of women framed by flowers, halos and flowing hair defined the look of fin-de-siècle Paris.

The chronicler of the Paris night.

Lautrec's first poster, for the Moulin Rouge in 1891, announced a new kind of advertising: bold flat colour, daring cropping and an unflinching eye for the performers he knew personally. Cabaret stars like La Goulue, Jane Avril and Aristide Bruant became icons through his lithographs.

The inventor of modern advertising imagery.

Cappiello swept away the busy scenes of earlier posters, setting a single bold, almost surreal figure against a plain dark ground — a green devil for a liqueur, a performer mid-leap. The effect was instant recognition from across a street, a principle advertisers have borrowed ever since.

The artist who sold the French Riviera to the world.

Best known for his work for the PLM railway, Broders turned sun-drenched coastlines, ski resorts and mountain lakes into some of the most desirable travel imagery of the interwar years — flattened perspective, saturated colour and an unmistakable sense of leisure and light.

The father of the "object poster".

In 1906 a young Berlin designer entered a poster competition for matches and, instead of an elaborate scene, painted two bold matches and a single brand name on a plain ground. The result launched the Sachplakat, or object poster, which dominated German advertising for decades.

The master of the British seaside railway poster.

Purvis became one of the best-known designers for the London & North Eastern Railway, whose posters sold the east coast with bright, flat colour and confident, simplified figures. His holidaymakers have the same sunny optimism that makes the genre so loved today.

The designer who brought modern art to the British poster.

Born in Montana, Kauffer moved to London in 1914 and became the leading poster artist of interwar Britain. Absorbing Cubism and other modern movements, he gave London Underground, Shell and the railways a bold, modern look that made advertising feel like art.

The poster artist of the Jazz Age.

In 1925 Colin's poster for the Revue Nègre, the show that introduced Josephine Baker to Paris, made both him and its star famous. His dynamic, rhythmic figures captured the energy of music, theatre and dance in the 1920s and 1930s.

The master of geometric Art Deco modernism.

Cassandre treated the poster as pure architecture — flattened, angular and built from bold planes of colour rather than illustration. His 1935 poster for the ocean liner Normandie remains one of the most recognisable images of the machine age.