Jules Chéret and Alphonse Mucha

My recent work on Eugène Rimmel for a mini online exhibition on my other blog: The John Johnson Collection: Now and Then led me to explore his little-known collaboration with his countryman Jules Chéret.

It was Chéret who compiled Les Maitres de l'Affiche. Published by Imprimerie Chaix between 1895 and 1900, this monthly publication showcased international lithographic poster art, including works by Toulouse Lautrec, Chéret himself, Steinlen, and Dudley Hardy.


It is now very easy to gain an overview of the works of artists, especially poster artists, through commercial sites, usually showing reproductions which can be ordered as prints, mugs, T shirts, etc. Googling offers quick and easy ways to see the works of Jules Chéret, Toulouse Lautrec, Steinlen, Dudley Hardy and others. The commercial All posters site includes the facility to view international musuem holdings, e.g. from the Musée Toulouse Lautrec in Albi, as well as searching by artist.

The complete works - Jules Chéret is a site which, while it does not include Chéret's work on valentines or almanacs, does present the advertising posters (124 images) for which he is famous, in an attractive manner.   There is also a biography. This too is a commercial site, offering hand-painted reproductions of the works, but there is, nevertheless, some descriptive metadata.

For more academic sites, with metadata, however, Gallica again  reveals what a rich resource it is, with no fewer than 1,165 results for Chéret, Jules, many from the Médiathèque de Chaumont. There are many  hundreds for Mucha, Lautrec etc.

(C) Gallica

 The V&A site also has a weatlth of posters, with a supporting study guide, which includes a superb bibliography.

(C) V&A

(C) Mucha Foundation

My interest in Alphonse Mucha was rekindled by a visit to Prague last summer, where I visited both Mucha museums. The Mucha Foundation has a wonderful website, full of information and with over 300 images of Mucha's key works

P & O ephemera

The P & O Heritage website is a gem. Well organised and visually rich, it has full records for each item with a contextualising paragraph on each of the main sections and subsections: Posters (Line voyages, Cruising), Photographs (Life on board, Ships), Printed Ephemera (P&O, Orient Line, British India), Paintings (People and places, Ships), Postcards (P&O, Other lines), Prints and Drawings (Pencillings, Ships), Seasonal collections (Father's Day, Christmas at sea), Canberra (Photographs, On board, Paintings and postcards, Posters), and Objects on board (China, Furniture and Fittings). There is also a special image gallery reflecting the company's 175 years.

.Reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection

 

Reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection

The three main access points: Our collection (Explore), Our history (Learn) and Our archive (Search) are very intuitve to use and there is a lot of information on the site, with links and research guides for family historians.
There is a specialised query screen for picture researchers, journalists and academics.

Much to explore, and wonderful images with the facility to buy prints and canvases (framed or unframed). 

Science and Society Picture Library (SSPL)

The Science and Society Picture Library is the official print sales website of the Science Museum, National Railway Museum (see also post dated 30 January) and the Royal Photographic Society Collection. There are 40,000 images, divided into Vintage posters, Transport, Photography, Natural World, Places, Science & Technology, Society and Wars, and Other Collections. Each category is further subdivided. The Vintage Poster Transport section, for example, covers Railways, Aviation, Road Transport (shown in the screen shot), Water Transport and Other.

Ephemera can also be found through the search box. Advertisement, poster, trade, bill, programme, etc are all fruitful terms.

This is another excellent site where ephemera play their part in telling the overall story.  The images are accompanied by descriptions, often providing context.

Browsing if free but this is, of course, a commercial site, selling high-quality prints of an impressive range of museum images in various sizes, framed or unframed, on canvas, etc.  Users can log in, create My favourites, and a Basket.

(C) SSPL

The Library of Congress: Performing arts posters and Shakespeare

There is much to explore for the ephemerist in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs online catalog.
For this series on theatre and entertainment (for Shakespeare week), I will confine this post to the 2114 performing arts posters. These include theatre, magic and minstrels and can be browsed as a list (with thumbnails), a gallery, a grid (as in the screen shot) or as a slide show or searched.  Searching is aided by helpful drop-down lists: a search for opera, for example, prompts opera houses, opera bouffe, opera Normandy, etc as well as operas and operatic.

(C) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

There are hits for Shakespeare, of course, and additionally the Library of Congress has a special section in its Imagination Gallery (part of American treasures) devoted to Shakespeare in America, which includes ephemera.

Playbills and programmes in the John Johnson Collection

18th and 19th century playbills and programmes from the John Johnson Collection are online. As well as those for theatrical performances, we have digitised ephemera relating to Actors and Actresses, Animals on Show, Circuses, Dioramas, Human Freaks, London Play Places, Magic and Mystery, Miniature Theatre, Museums, Minstrels, Playbills on Silk, and Performances in Royal Residences.

18th century material is on the Oxford Digital Library 18th century Entertainment site.   Access is free to all.  Images and (more detailed) metadata are also available through the John Johnson Collection online catalogue.

19th century programmes and playbills are online in The John Johnson Collection: an archive of printed ephemera (ProQuest). As well as being cross-searchable with Crime, Advertising, Booktrade ephemera and Popular prints,  Entertainment resources have their own search screens.

The ProQuest project is free in the UK, through Higher and Further Education, Schools, and Public Libraries. Access to the last two requires the completion of a form.  Outside the UK, the resource is available through institutional subscription only.   Records (without images) for 19th century Entertainment are also available through the John Johnson Collection online catalogue.

The image gallery below gives a tiny glimpse of the sort of material you will find.

(C) Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: John Johnson Collection

Seed catalogues 3: The US National Agricultural Library

The National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture) has, within its Special Collections, a major collection of seed catalogues: The Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection. There are 200,000 catalogues, from America and a wide range of other countries (including Britain), mostly from 1890 to the present but with some dating back to the late 18th century. The image gallery presents selected covers of catalogues from the US by period (1750-1875, 1876-1900, 1901-1925) and from Japan, mostly from the Yokohama Nursery Co,. Ltd.

(C) National Agricultural Library (United States Department of Agriculture)

The Library also has a collection of posters relating to the Women's Land Army, War, Rural Electrification Administration, and the World's Poultry Congress.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France: press posters and more

Another post about one of my favourite sites: Gallica,  the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's digital library.  Gallica in fact goes far beyond the holdings of the BNF, covering some 40 other institutions with compatible collections, including the Collège des Irlandais de Paris, the National Library of Brazil, the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève (which has superb ephemera collections not yet digitised I think), the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, and the Library of Congress (joint France in America project).

I particularly liked the press publicity posters exposed through Twitter and Facebook yesterday.  Clicking on "informations détaillées" not only shows the metadata for the object but the user can click through to other works by the same illustrator or to further searches by associated terms. The menu on the left facilitates limiting the result set to specific artists, centuries or country.  There is an English language version too.

(C) Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The search screen is well designed. I used: Text : affiche  Limited by language:- Anglais and Document type : - Image to find 243 superb English posters with a further 58 results substituting publicité for affiche.  This site is very well worth exploring, especially for Francophiles and those interested in lithographed posters.

(C) Gallica. Bibliothèque Nationale de France



 

The Wellcome Library

The Wellcome Library includes 43,000 16th-21st century ephemera relating to the history of medicine. This material is being surfaced through the Wellcome Library's online catalogue, through a blog (tag Ephemera)  and through Wellcome Images, where tags include advertisements and ephemera. Where they exist, full bibliographic records from the library catalogue are linked to images in Wellcome Images. Thumbnails appear in the corresponding catalogue entries.  Only c.10 per cent of the ephemera are fully catalogued, with box level records for the rest. Enquiries should be directed to library@wellcome.ac.uk.

Useful search terms for genres relevant to ephemera (select genre/medium in library catalogue search) are:

Addresses, Advertisements, Advertising cards, Advertising fliers (div by century), Albums, Almanacs, Auction catalogues, Badges, Bags, Ballads, Billheads, Blank forms, Blotting paper, Book covers, Bookmarks, Bookplates, Books printed as advertisements, Booksellers advertisements, Broadsides (subdiv geog & chron), Cards, Calendars, Cartes de visite, Cartoons (commentary), Catalogues, Certifcates, Christmas cards, Cigarette cards, Concert programs, Cut paper works, Cutouts, Devotional images, Direct mail, Display cards, England broadsides, Envelopes, Ephemera, Exhibition catalogues, Exhibition posters, Gameboards, Greetings cards, Handbills, Handkerchiefs, Invitations, Jigsaw puzzles, Keys (legends).Labels, Lantern slides, Leaflets, Letterheads, Library catalogues, Lottery tickets, Magazine inserts, Manufacturers catalogues, Membership cards, Membership lists, Menus, Motion picture posters, Optical toys, Packaging, Panoramic views, Paper toys, Photographic postcards, Pictorial envelopes, Playing cards, Postage stamps, Postal stationery, Postcards, Posters, Price lists, Proclamations, Programs, Prospectuses, Protest posters, Publishers catalogues, Puzzles. Raffle tickets, Rebuses, Regulations, Sales catalogues, Sheet music covers, Souvenir programs, Stationery, Stickers, Theater programs, Theatrical posters,  Tickets, Trade cards, Trade catalogues, Transfer sheets, Transparencies, Valentines, Visiting cards, Wall charts, War posters,  and Window cards.

Wellcome images also has a Facebook page and can be followed on Tumblr, Flickr and on Twitter (@wellcomeimages).

© Wellcome Images / Wellcome Library, London

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The National Archive Image Library

The National Archive Image Library is a commercial image service, but also offers a glimpse of ephemera and other images from the National Archive's vast collections. The images are divided into the following categories: Buildings and factories, Colonial and empire, Crime, Design, Entertainment and theatre, Events and exhibitions, First World War, Mamuscripts, Maps, Medical, Military, Mining, People, Piracy, Places, Politics, Second World War, Slavery, Transport and Travel, and Victoriana.

(C) National Archives

There are also Monthly showcases which take a seasonal or topical theme, to date:  New Year, Winter, War and National Savings, Queens and Crowns, London, Seaside, Sports, Titanic, Creative Images, and Festival of Britain.

(C) The National Archives

Further images, mainly photographic but including some ephemera, are available copyright-free through The National Archives UK's Photostream on Flickr.  These have been tagged. The screen shot shows images relating to Christmas.

New York Public Library digital collections

Happy Thanksgiving. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery contains a wealth of ephemera. You can search by collection (such as the Billy Rose Theater Collection or the Jerome Robbins Dance Division) or by subject.

(C) New York Public Library

(C) New York Public Library

Below is a selection of circus and magic posters from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection

Museum of London

The Museum of London has wonderful collections of ephemera and is actively surfacing them, notably the tinsel prints, valentines, Christmas cards and trade cards.
The Collections pages enable you to read about the collections and to search (here I searched for suffrage).

(c) Museum of London

(c) Museum of London

As well as the museum's website Ellie, the Project Assistant focussing on ephemera, is blogging regularly about progress.

The Museum's commercial site has thousands of images which can be searched and ordered.

History of Advertising Trust

The History of Advertising Trust collections are divided into: Advertising Agencies, Advertising Regulation and Codes of Practice, Clubs, Associations and Organisations, Corporate Marketing Archives (including Hovis, HP Foods, Rowntree, SmithKline Beecham, and Sturmey Archer), Designers and Creatives, Professional Interest Bodies, TV and Cinema Commercials, HAT Special Collections & Compilations, and HAT Library. The site contains a wealth of visual material, including an Online gallery. There is also the facility to buy Vintage Advertising Poster Prints.

(c) HAT

Evanion Collection (British Library)

(c) British Library

The British Library's Evanion Collection has two main themes: Popular Entertainment and Everyday Life.  Images from the Collection are available through Collect Britain and can be licensed through the BL's Images Online.