Before the Beggarstaff Brothers initiated the reform movement in British poster art--the early phase of which, despite the effective colour sense of Walter Crane, passed away all too soon with the death of Aubrey Beardsley--Chéret, Steinlen, and Mucha were already at work in France, the first and eldest of these masters being practically the creator of the modern poster in its more individual characteristics. A good deal of the Victorian heaviness was still with us in the eighteen-nineties: we liked good solid meals; our theatres offered us feasts of ponderous sentimentality; and so the British merchant and advertising agent, employing a poster artist, bade him tell us of the things we liked best--sauces, soaps, melodramas, tea, and stout. For still the idea was prevalent that the successful advertiser appealed to his public most when he told them about something they already knew and liked: a sweet domestic scene to linger in the memory after dinner and remind them of Tompkins' pills; or a pleasant landscape executed with a kaleidoscopic richness of colour to persuade one to buy Fishville Sauce. There were, of course, many striking exceptions to this; but it was generally true enough to justify the American observer's criticism that British posters mostly depicted things to eat, or soap.
But France, being by temperament, by environment, and by tradition a far more artistic nation, with a much higher standard of general taste, responded more readily to the lighter and more fascinating touch of those artists who chose the street and the theatre entrance as their gallery. It is more than fifty years since Chéret started on his flamboyant comet-like career, setting Paris aflame (so to speak) with joyously wild, irresponsible visions of colour and line, delicate and fantastic. Steinlen, Mucha, Grasset, Toulouse-Lautrec, Willette, Bonnard, Guillaume, and others worked with him in more recent days, and among these are artists who have done masterly posters for France during the War.
It is still with the greatest reluctance that a drawing, even when it conveys a definite suggestion clearly, is accepted in England unless it is "finished": the value of a work of art is reckoned in accordance with the amount of patient craftsmanship which it displays. The French poster artist, on the contrary--and he obviously has the public as his supporter, or his vogue would cease--is often content to throw upon the space at his command what, on this side of the Channel, any advertising agent would scoff at and reject as a "mere sketch." If the French artist can convey his suggestion, his idea, in a few hasty lines or brilliant touches of colour, he knows that his work is done, and is well content.