Jules Chéret: The Man Who Invented the Modern Poster

Est. reading time: 8 minutes | Category: Poster Artists | Period: Belle Époque

Walk the streets of Paris in the 1880s and you couldn’t miss them. Eight feet tall, blazing with colour, alive with laughing women and the promise of a night at the Moulin Rouge — these posters stopped people in their tracks. The man behind them was Jules Chéret, and he didn’t just make great posters. He invented the very idea of what a poster could be.

If you love vintage poster art — the energy of Belle Époque design, the rich chromolithography, the iconic female figures — it all starts here. This guide covers everything you need to know about Jules Chéret: his life, his technique, his legacy, and why his work still commands attention today.

Quick Facts: Jules Chéret at a Glance

Born: 31 May 1836, Paris, France

Died: 23 September 1932, Nice, France (aged 96)

Medium: Chromolithography, oil painting, pastels

Known for: Father of the Modern Poster, the ‘Chérettes’

Award: Légion d’honneur, 1890

Output: 1,000+ poster designs

Key clients: Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, Olympia, Rimmel

Influenced: Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, Charles Gesmar

1. Who Was Jules Chéret? A Life in Brief

From Typesetter’s Son to Artistic Revolutionary

Jules Chéret was born on 31 May 1836 into a modest Parisian family. His father was a typesetter — a fitting origin for a man who would one day transform the printed page into art. Money was tight, and Chéret’s formal schooling ended at thirteen when he was placed into a three-year apprenticeship with a lithographer. He supplemented his training with evening classes at the École Nationale de Dessin, studying the old masters on weekend visits to Paris’s great museums.

Selling sketches to music publishers barely kept him afloat, so Chéret took a chance and moved to London. There he absorbed the British approach to commercial printing — bolder, more direct, less cluttered than the French norm — and began designing posters in monochrome. He also worked for the perfume manufacturer Eugène Rimmel, a relationship that would prove pivotal.

The London Years and the Rimmel Connection

Rimmel was more than a client: he was a patron. In 1866, he bankrolled Chéret’s return to Paris and the establishment of his own colour lithographic print studio — the first of its kind in France. With control over every stage of the printing process, Chéret was free to experiment in ways no one had before. The results changed everything.

2. Chéret’s Revolutionary Technique: How He Did It

Before Chéret, posters were dull. Dense text, limited colour, little visual energy. Lithography existed, but it was slow, expensive, and rarely used for large-scale advertising. Chéret transformed the medium through a combination of technical innovation and artistic daring.

Working Directly on Stone

Most lithographers of the era had an artist produce a design, which was then copied onto a printing stone by a craftsman — a process that lost spontaneity at every step. Chéret worked directly on the stone himself, drawing freehand with spirited brush lines, crosshatch, stipple, and watercolour-like washes. The energy of his hand transferred directly to the print.

The Three-Stone Colour System

In 1869, Chéret introduced a new chromolithographic process using three printing stones: one black, one red, and a third producing a graduated background — cool tones at the top bleeding into warm tones at the bottom. This ‘fond gradué’ technique was the foundation of his vibrant colour palette throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Paired with his reduction in production costs, it made large colour posters commercially viable for the first time.

Scale, Simplicity, and Impact

As his style matured through the 1880s, Chéret moved away from the Victorian decorative clutter typical of the time. His compositions became simpler and more powerful: a large central figure, bold hand-lettered titles, simplified backgrounds, and areas of flat glowing colour. These were posters designed to be read from a moving carriage — immediate, joyful, unmissable.

Design Principles Chéret Established (Still Used Today):

• Dominant central figure to anchor the composition

• Bold, readable hand-lettered type

• Warm/cool colour contrast for depth and vibrancy

• White space as a design tool, not a gap

• Movement and gesture to convey energy

• Drop-shadow lettering for hierarchy and contrast

3. The Chérettes: Poster Girls Who Changed How Paris Saw Women

If one element defines Chéret’s work above all others, it’s the women. Joyful, lightly clad, often mid-twirl — these figures were unlike anything in French visual culture at the time. They became so recognisable that Parisians gave them a name: the Chérettes.

Women in 19th-century art tended toward one of two extremes: saintly virtue or outright vice. Chéret’s Chérettes were neither. Inspired by the garden-party women of Rococo painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Antoine Watteau, they were modern, free-spirited, and entirely at ease with their own pleasure. They smoked in public. They wore low-cut bodices. They danced alone if they felt like it.

For the women of Paris, these images were quietly radical. One writer of the era noted that it was ‘difficult to conceive of Paris without its Chérets.’ The feminist critic Roger Marx went further, crediting Chéret as an unlikely father of women’s liberation — an artist whose commercial posters did more for the image of the modern Frenchwoman than many a political pamphlet.

4. A Thousand Posters: The Full Scope of His Work

Over a career spanning six decades, Chéret produced more than 1,000 poster designs. His client list reads like a tour of Belle Époque Paris:

• Music halls and cabarets: Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, Eldorado, Olympia, Alcazar d’Été

• Theatres and opera: Théâtre de l’Opéra, touring troupes, municipal festivals

• Consumer products: Rimmel perfumes, soaps, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, lamp oil

• Transport and industry: railroad companies, manufacturing businesses

• Performers: Loïe Fuller, Yvette Guilbert, Sarah Bernhardt

His first major poster, created in 1858, advertised Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. One of his most admired works — the 1893 Folies Bergère poster featuring the American dancer Loïe Fuller — hangs today in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

So prolific and so in demand was Chéret that he eventually ran one of Paris’s most important commercial printing operations, expanding services as fast as new clients arrived.

5. Recognition: The Légion d’Honneur and a Museum of His Own

In 1890, the French government awarded Chéret the Légion d’honneur — France’s highest civilian honour. The citation was remarkable: he was being recognised not for painting or sculpture, but for creating an art form that served commerce and industry. Edmond de Goncourt, toasting Chéret at the ceremony, called him ‘the first painter of the Paris wall, the inventor of the art in the poster.’

In 1884, Chéret had organised the first group poster exhibition in art history, cementing the medium’s status as fine art. In 1895 he curated the Maîtres de l’Affiche — a prestigious anthology of 256 reduced-format reproductions showcasing the finest work of 97 Parisian poster artists, distributed to collectors by subscription.

He retired to Nice in his later years, where a museum was established in his honour in 1928 — four years before his death in 1932 at the age of 96. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice still stands today.

6. Chéret’s Legacy: Everyone You Love in Poster Art Learned from Him

The influence of Jules Chéret on graphic design cannot be overstated. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec studied his work closely before creating his first poster — La Goulue — for the Moulin Rouge in 1891. Alphonse Mucha, whose sinuous Art Nouveau style became the era’s other dominant visual language, built directly on Chéret’s foundations. Charles Gesmar, later the exclusive designer for Mistinguett, was another direct inheritor.

Chéret’s innovations fed directly into the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s, and from there into virtually every strand of modern graphic design: the emphasis on a dominant image, bold readable type, colour as emotion rather than decoration, and design as a craft worthy of artistic ambition.

One art critic of the time put it plainly: ‘There was a thousand times more talent in the smallest of Chéret’s posters than in the majority of pictures on the walls of the Paris Salon.’ The critics agreed. The public agreed. And every great poster artist of the following century, whether they knew it or not, agreed too.

7. Collecting Jules Chéret: What to Know

Original Chéret lithographs regularly appear at auction and through specialist dealers. As with any collectible poster art, condition is paramount — look for strong colour saturation, minimal foxing or fading, and clean margins. Works that retain their original linen backing tend to hold value better.

The most sought-after originals include the Folies Bergère series, the Moulin Rouge posters, and the Loïe Fuller chromolithographs. Reproductions and the smaller Maîtres de l’Affiche prints are more accessible entry points for new collectors.

Collector’s Checklist for Chéret Posters:

✓ Confirm printing period — original lithographs vs. later reproductions

✓ Examine colour vibrancy — original inks have a warmth offset prints lack

✓ Check for printer’s mark — Chéret’s own studio prints are most valued

✓ Consider provenance — documented exhibition history adds premium

✓ For wall display: UV-protective glazing preserves colour long-term

Frequently Asked Questions About Jules Chéret

Why is Jules Chéret called the father of the modern poster?

Chéret was the first artist to successfully combine large-scale chromolithographic printing with bold, joyful design intended specifically for public display. He transformed the poster from a text-heavy notice into a powerful visual medium, establishing design conventions — dominant figure, bold type, vibrant colour — that persist today.

What is chromolithography, and why did Chéret’s version matter?

Chromolithography is a printing process using multiple inked stones to build up colour. Chéret’s innovation was his three-stone system (black, red, graduated background), combined with working directly on the stone himself, which gave his prints an energy and spontaneity that mechanically copied designs lacked. He also drove down costs, making large colour posters commercially viable for the first time.

Who were the Chérettes?

The Chérettes were the recurring female figures in Chéret’s poster work — joyful, lively, lightly clad women who embodied the pleasure and freedom of Belle Époque Paris. Inspired by Rococo painting, they were entirely novel in popular visual culture: neither virtuous nor scandalous, simply modern and free. Parisians adored them.

Did Jules Chéret influence Toulouse-Lautrec?

Yes, directly. Toulouse-Lautrec openly acknowledged Chéret’s influence, and his first poster — for the Moulin Rouge in 1891 — shows clear debts to Chéret’s compositional approach, use of flat colour, and bold lettering. The same is true of Alphonse Mucha and much of the broader Art Nouveau movement.

Where can I see Jules Chéret’s work today?

Major public collections holding Chéret works include the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Many of his posters also appear regularly at specialist auction houses and in private galleries worldwide.

Final Thoughts: Why Jules Chéret Still Matters

Jules Chéret lived for 96 years, produced over a thousand posters, won the Légion d’honneur, inspired an entire artistic movement, and changed the way cities looked. Yet he started with almost nothing: no formal education, no family connections, a three-year apprenticeship and a determination to make art on the street.

His posters were made to sell things — theatre tickets, perfume, lamp oil. But they gave Paris something more lasting: colour, joy, and a new kind of woman. If you stand in front of an original Chéret today, you feel it immediately. That energy hasn’t dimmed in a hundred and fifty years.

That’s what makes him the father of the modern poster — not just the technique, not just the volume of work, but the fact that he understood, before almost anyone else, that a great poster isn’t just advertising. It’s a gift to everyone who walks past it.

Sources & Further Reading: Wikipedia / Jules Chéret • Britannica • Driehaus Museum • MoMA Collection • Artnet • Artsy • Contessa Gallery

Article written for pasttimeposters.com — all factual claims sourced from established art history references.