Posters
a bill or placard, printed or illustrated, conspicuously exhibited to convey a message to the public. The practice of using placards for public information had its vogue among both the Greeks and Romans, but the invention of printing gave the custom a development which has kept pace with modern civilization. In several cities of Europe it was the practice in the 17th century to affix theatrical announcements to the rails and posts in the streets, POST-IMPRESSIONISM and in Paris the color of the poster indicated the theater. The posters sometimes consisted of letterpress large and bold enough to catch the public eye; sometimes the posters had representations of characters and scenes from the play. The colored poster, as we now know it, was developed by Chéret, the lithographer, in Paris, who issued the first example of his skill in 1866. The circus and the theater have had the chief hand in the development of the pictorial poster, which, by the representation of stage characters, ballet girls, children, and animals, has attained a high level of art. The French poster designers, among them Grasset, Toulouse-Lautrec, Willette, Forain, Guillaume, Schwaebe, and Gossard, have given France first place in the art, but the art has attained a great development in the United States, and men like Penfield and Bradley gave it the impetus which has carried it into every field of advertising that allows pictorial representation.