Chat Noir

Steinlen produced this poster in 1896 as a touring advertisement for the Compagnie du Chat Noir, the celebrated shadow-puppet cabaret founded by impresario Rodolphe Salis on the rue de Laval in Paris. The original Chat Noir cabaret had closed the year prior with Salis's death, but its artistic legacy was potent enough to sustain a traveling revue, and this lithograph, printed by the Parisian firm Lévy Frères, served as its herald across French cities. Steinlen had been a fixture of Montmartre since emigrating from Lausanne in 1881, contributing illustrations to the cabaret's own journal and forming a close working relationship with its community of poets, composers, and visual artists. The image belongs to the same extraordinary decade that produced Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge posters and Alphonse Mucha's Gismonda: a concentrated moment when Art Nouveau and the democratizing force of color lithography converged to make the Paris street corner a gallery wall. Steinlen's Chat Noir became arguably the most recognized image to emerge from that milieu, reproduced so widely that the original stones were worn through multiple print runs; it remains a primary document of Belle Époque visual culture and the bohemian spirit that defined the Montmartre quarter before Haussmann's modernization fully erased it.