Clinique Chéron

Steinlen created this advertisement poster for the Parisian veterinary practice of Dr. Chéron, located at 8 Rue des Moulins, in 1905: a period when the Swiss-born artist was at the height of his commercial and fine art reputation in Paris. Having arrived in Montmartre in 1881, Steinlen had spent more than two decades immersing himself in the social fabric of the city, producing work for Le Chat Noir cabaret and its journal, illustrating for Gil Blas Illustré, and earning recognition as one of the foremost practitioners of the Art Nouveau poster alongside Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha. Unlike Mucha's sinuous female ideals or Lautrec's acid social commentary, Steinlen's particular genius was sympathetic naturalism: his animals, and particularly his cats, were observed with a tenderness that came from genuine cohabitation: his own household was famously populated with cats, which became a recurring subject throughout his career. The Clinique Chéron poster sits within a body of animal-centered work that includes his iconic 1894 Lait pur de la Vingeanne Stérilisé and reflects the broader Belle Époque appetite for elevated commercial art that functioned simultaneously as street-level spectacle and collectible image. Today the poster is held in major graphic arts collections and is regarded as one of the period's finest examples of the veterinary and animal welfare advocacy genre rendered through lithographic poster art.