Picture Posters: A Short History of the Illustrated Placard with Many Reproductions of the Most Artistic Examples in all CountriesHiatt, Charles
History
Picture Posters: A Short History of the Illustrated Placard with Many Reproductions of the Most Artistic Examples in all Countries
Hiatt, Charles
Posters -- History
Mr. Penfield is still young, having been born at Brooklyn in the year
1866, so that if he was the first American artist to deal with the
poster, the movement in that continent is obviously a recent one.
Most of his posters are on a small scale, and partake of the nature
of window-bills rather than of placards especially destined to the
hoarding. At the same time, Mr. Penfield has been by no means slow to
appreciate that it is the first
[Illustration: 0309]
business of an advertisement to advertise, and his appreciation of this
fad, coupled with a very dainty fancy and no small technical skill, has
led to results which are of unquestionable importance. With his earliest
efforts I cannot pretend to be well acquainted. In 1893 he produced
for a firm at Salem a large bill which measures eighty-one by forty-two
inches. The subject is a girl in a black dress and yellow jacket who is
laden with packages. For the publications of the firm of Harpers,
Mr. Penfield has done quite a quantity of excellent and artistic
advertisements. Amongst the most effective is one produced for a special
midsummer number of "Harper's Bazar," representing a girl playing
a banjo, divided by a crimson sun from an attentive listener of the
opposite sex. Again, for the issue of July, 1894, the artist gives us
a girl in white lighting red crackers arranged to spell the name of the
month. For the February number of the following year, we are presented,
most appropriately, with a gentleman posting a valentine in an orange
coloured letter-box. In April of the same year, Mr. Penfield gives us
Joan of Arc in yellow, wielding sword and staff. Amongst the numerous
books which Mr. Penfield has advertised may be mentioned "The Cloister
and the Hearth," "Pastime Stories," "Our English Cousins," and
"Perlycross." This artist's work is always ingeniously conceived, and
the colour schemes are not seldom pleasantly audacious. Mr. Penfield
gives us very agreeable versions of the American girl in general, and of
the "summer girl" in particular. His maidens are adorably conscious of
their power to charm, and are fully alive to the fact that their gowns
are of the smartest.
To turn from Mr. Penfield to Mr. Louis J. Rhead is to turn to an artist
settled in the United States, but English by birth and education. Mr.
Rhead was born at Etruria, that unclassical place with the classical
name, and comes of a family of artists. He was, I believe, a student at
South
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[Illustration: 0314]
Kensington for several years, and only reached America in 1883. He has
exhibited at the
[Illustration: 0316]
Salon and the Academy and other important picture shows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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