In 1925, Leonetto Cappiello was at the peak of a career that had already changed the visual language of the modern world. Born in Livorno in 1875, this self-taught Tuscan artist had moved to Paris at just 23 and within a few years had made himself indispensable to the booming advertising industry of the Belle Époque and beyond.

Where his predecessors — Chéret, Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec — filled their posters with flowing Art Nouveau detail, Cappiello did something entirely different. He reduced. He simplified. He shocked. A single bold figure against a dark background. Vivid, unexpected colour. An image that hit you before you had time to think. This approach, radical at the time, became the template for virtually all commercial graphic art that followed. It is why he is called, without exaggeration, the Father of Modern Advertising.

By the time the Biscotti Wamar commission arrived in 1925, Cappiello had already produced unforgettable campaigns for Campari, Cinzano, Pirelli, Chocolat Klaus and hundreds of others. He had over five hundred posters to his name. Yet he brought the same inventive energy to a biscuit advertisement as he did to his grandest commissions.

The result is one of his most enchanting works. A winged fairy astride a rearing unicorn — pure fantasy deployed in the service of a very ordinary product, and elevated into something you cannot look away from. It is witty, warm, and technically masterly: the composition perfectly balanced, the colour palette bold and assured, the sense of movement palpable.

Original Cappiello lithographs are held in museum collections across Europe and regularly fetch four and five-figure sums at auction. This museum-quality reproduction has been professionally restored from an original source, with careful colour correction to restore Cappiello’s vivid palette to full life.

It belongs on a wall — a kitchen, a dining room, a studio, a hallway — anywhere that deserves something with genuine art-historical weight behind it.

New reproduction: a modern fine art print, printed to order on premium paper — not an original or antique poster.

advertising art