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"In former days a few posters by
E. Delacroix, Nanteuil, Daumier, Gavarni, Henri
Monnier,
and later Manet, made up the whole of this branch of art.
. . Then Chéret appeared."
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 Real artistic originality in the covers of music-
hall
songs began through the efforts of a publisher named Gr.
Ondet, one of whose publications was, for instance, Les
Montmartroises, words by M. Gondezki, one of the
most audacious of the Chat noir songwriters, and
with a lithograph in color by Gr. de Feure, a young
Montmartre painter of Dutch birth—a man of vigorous if
rather morbid talent. Ondet took a large risk in making
this innovation (at first in connection with covers by M.
H. Gr. Ibels), and for awhile his songs found no sale ;
but he persevered (luckier than Jules Lévy, whose story I
told above), and thanks to Ibels, Steinlen, and
Toulouse-Lautrec, his usual illustrators, he succeeded in
setting this fashion for the publication of cheap music.
To be quite exact, I ought to say that even before him Bruant, the song-writer of the Outer Boulevards,
had had his songs illustrated by Steinlen ; but this was
quite an isolated experiment.
There remains to be considered one final form of the
poster, in its relations to artistic undertakings — that
is, the poster designed for exhibitions, and especially
for art exhibitions, general and individual.
 The
poster mania is a comparatively new disease—an
excellent disease, by the way, for it furnishes material
for some rich and curious collections; and one which has
brought into being a whole branch of commerce and industry
far from unimportant. In former days a few posters by
E.Delacroix, Nanteuil, Dau-mier, Gavarni, Henri Monnier,
and later Manet, made up the whole of this branch of art,
and these few could be kept by a print-collector in a
small portfolio. Then Chéret appeared. He produced
hundreds of posters that were eagerly collected,
especially as they were not very easily secured. Then
everybody began, not only to collect posters, but to make
them; every painter was ambitious to be a Chéret—but non
licet omnibus.
The successive stages of this commerce in posters are
interesting to note. When the first works of this kind
appeared upon the walls, the novelty-lovers began their
campaign. How could these mural frescos be secured ? To peel them off the walls one's self, at night, seemed
the simplest plan, but it was also the most dangerous. It
involved the risk of being caught in the act, taken to the
police station and soundly fined, to say nothing of the
risk of "peeling " them badly and getting off
the wall only a thing of tatters. It became necessary,
then, to secure the complicity of an all-powerful
personage— the bill-poster. How many great collectors,
honorable and honored men, rich and well placed in life,
have bowed down before His Majesty the Bill-poster! The paster of posters, realizing a sum which
varied with the importance or the vogue of the matter in
hand, came to deserve the name of the un-paster of
posters. That was the primitive period, the stone age, of
poster-collectors. The bronze age began when one or two
print-sellers in the neighborhood of the quais arranged
with the bill-posters for a few copies which they sold to
their customers. But there were suits brought by the
printers and artists, and sentences pronounced; for the
courts would not admit that the interest of art gave the
right to dispose in this way of merchandise which did not
belong to the sellers. And thus, by severe lessons, was
ushered in the golden age in which we live.
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 The print-sellers, driven by the growing flood of
demand, finally decided that it was worth while to arrange
with the proprietors of the posters themselves, that a
part of each printing should be reserved for amateurs ;
and so the commerce in posters became a real profession,
which dealers like Messrs. Kleinmann & Gagot practice
on a large scale. There is in fact—and this is the
captivating side of all real collecting— an actual
bourse, an exchange, for posters. The philosopher may
smile, but the collector will let him smile. Not only
posters as such, but even (as in the case of the most
valuable prints) different " states " of the poster are collected.
Posters before letter, posters on common paper and paper de
luxe, signed by the artist, or numbered in accordance
with a rigidly limited numbering of copies. And why not,
after all, since these lithographs have become true
artistic prints ? There have been, and will be again,
exhibitions of posters where the names of Chéret, Grasset,
Willette, Toulouse -Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Louis
Anguetin, G. de Feure, H. G. Ibels, and others are most
highly valued. These posters are sought by amateurs and
individual buyers for decorating apartments, halls, etc.
There is even a small trade generated by the large trade —that of the mounter of posters ; a workman
(sometimes a binder, sometimes a framer) who pastes
posters on a fine cloth back with a roller at each end,
like the Japanese kakimonos.
 Perhaps it was a little beyond the reader's expectation
to see this little matter of the Parisian kakimono touched
upon. But it is the most curious and the least known part
of the history of the artistic poster. It might be
supposed that art exhibitions had furnished a pretext for
the most remarkable posters of this sort, but this is not
quite true. Some very commonplace posters have been made
for very beautiful exhibitions. Besides, actual posters
for art exhibitions have been comparatively rare; some
painters have painted signs rather than post ers, to be put
at the door of the place where they exhibited their works.
But as these were compositions of which only a single
example was painted, the souvenir disappeared as soon as
the exhibition itself was finished. M. Bodinier, manager
of the Théatre d'Application, otherwise called the
Bodiniére, where the most heterogeneous experiments in art
and literature are gathered together — mixtures of
talent and pretension, the whole résumé, in fact, of
that art-madness which is just now carrying
away the world of fashion—M. Bodinier has a most curious
collection of these improvised posters. In his place
several of the most remarkable exhibitions have occurred,
notably those of Chéret, Ibels, Steinlen, and others, and
each of these has furnished the subject of an interesting
poster, especially that of Steinlen reproduced [here].
Another center of exhibition of a kind more vital and
purely artistic is the gallery of the periodical La
Plume. The Salon des Cent, as the Exhibition of La
Plume is called, has each time called forth a very
different genre of poster, from an elegant bit of parisiennerie
like that of M. Graston Noury, to an austere piece of
work like that of Grasset, or a subtle study like that of M.
G. de Feure.
Finally, it should be mentioned that some exhibitions
organized at the École des Beaux-Arts have been advertised
by Chéret's posters. It is rather amusing to note this,
Chéret's talent being not precisely academic.
If we glance back at this little essay, we shall notice
that the artists who themselves make the posters have
generally served their own interests less efficiently than
they have those of the manufacturers, musicians, and
novelists. Painters have not the reputation of being
especially modest, and yet they have had least recourse of
all to the advertising quality of the poster. They are
like famous cooks, who only very rarely taste their own
cooking.
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