Jules Chéret Prints

About Jules Chéret

Jules Chéret was born in Paris in May 1836, the son of a typographer, and was apprenticed to a lithographer at thirteen. He worked in London in the 1860s, where he learned the English methods of colour lithography and designed book covers and perfume labels for Rimmel, and in 1866 he returned to Paris with English presses and opened his own printing works. From then until the end of the century he designed well over a thousand posters for the theatres, music halls, dance halls, skating rinks, lamp oils, soaps and newspapers of Paris: the Folies-Bergère, the Moulin Rouge when it opened in 1889, the Palais de Glace, Loïe Fuller, Yvette Guilbert, Saxoléine. His method, overlapping sprays of transparent colour over a loose black line, turned the street poster from a block of type into a picture, and his laughing, dancing women, the Chérettes, became the type of the Parisienne. His press merged with Chaix in 1881, and the firm issued Les Maîtres de l'Affiche, the monthly series of reduced posters, from 1895. Degas called him the Watteau of the streets; in 1890 he received the Légion d'honneur, the first poster artist to be honoured for his posters. He died in Nice in September 1932.