Compagnie Francaise Des Chocolats Et Des Thes

Steinlen produced this poster in 1895 for the Compagnie Française des Chocolats et des Thés, a French confectionery company, at a moment when the commercial lithographic poster had become the dominant visual medium of Parisian public life. The commission was printed by Eugène Verneau in Paris, and it circulated widely on city hoardings and in shop windows, entering the visual vocabulary of the Belle Époque alongside works by Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret. Steinlen, a Swiss-born artist who had settled in Montmartre in 1881, was by the mid-1890s at the height of his poster output, contributing regularly to Le Chat Noir and other publications while accepting commercial commissions that he treated with the same compositional seriousness as his fine art work. This poster exemplifies the Art Nouveau graphic tradition as it manifested in France: legible, emotionally immediate, and technically accomplished in its management of flat color and contour. It is held in the collections of major poster archives internationally and remains one of the most reproduced works in the history of commercial graphic art, appreciated both for its pictorial warmth and for its role in documenting the domestic consumer culture of late-nineteenth-century France.