Leonetto Cappiello Prints
1875–1942 · Italian-French · Modern poster
Wall art by Leonetto Cappiello, restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte fine-art paper.
7 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Leonetto Cappiello
Leonetto Cappiello was born in Livorno in April 1875 and taught himself to draw; he published an album of caricatures at twenty and moved to Paris in 1898, where his caricatures of actresses and writers appeared in Le Rire and Le Figaro. His first poster, for the magazine Le Frou-Frou in 1899, already had the formula that made him the most prolific poster designer of the next thirty years: one figure, often grotesque or acrobatic, in bright flat colour against a single dark or plain ground, with the product name and nothing else. Where Chéret's posters were pictures, Cappiello's were signs, made to be read from a moving omnibus, and they sold chocolate, aperitifs, umbrellas, pasta and cough wadding across France and Italy. He designed more than five hundred posters, printed by Vercasson and later by Devambez, and he is usually called the father of the modern advertising poster. He became a French citizen in 1930 and died at Cannes in February 1942.