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.

Our archival giclee reproduction on museum-grade cotton canvas preserves details that standard poster reprints consistently lose: the subtle warm-to-cool gradation across the ochre background as it shifts from the heated center of the composition toward the cooler margins behind the cat's silhouette; the precise tonal separation between the woman's near-black jacket and the deep burgundy of her blouse, which in lesser reproductions collapses into a single undifferentiated dark; and the fine white chest marking on the cat, which anchors the foreground with a highlight that cheap offset prints render as a blown-out smear. Our source file has been digitally restored from high-resolution museum scans, recovering the original warmth of Steinlen's ochre ground and the clean, confident outlines of his figures: qualities that degraded poster-quality prints routinely sacrifice to reduce ink cost. The ornate composite frame, finished in aged gold, complements the terracotta lettering and warm cream ground of this composition without competing with the boldness of Steinlen's color choices, presenting the work as the considered piece of graphic art history that it is.