With eye-catching graphics and bold colours, vintage advertising posters in a vast array of genres are highly sought after by collectors today, saysEllie Tennant
In our digital age, we are bombarded with adverts. From subtle influencer ‘ads’ with hashtags on social media to the invisible algorithms that target marketing based on what we look at online, brands can advertise to us directly using irresistible images and ‘click-to-buy’ temptation. In a world where eagerly awaited and unashamedly emotive Christmas TV adverts are presented to us as if they were feature films, the lines between brainwashing and beauty are confusingly blurred.
Adverts have the power to move us to tears, while all the time compelling us to spend, spend, spend. ‘It’s hard to imagine a simpler time, but before the internet, magazines or TV, the main way to advertise any goods – be it an airline, a piece of soap, a play, or an alcoholic beverage – was the poster,’ says Richard Barclay, vintage poster consultant at Bonhams. ‘Before posters came on the scene, there were only black-and-white letterpress ads, which were fairly small and placed in newspapers. It wasn’t ideal for advertisers because newspapers were not read by everybody, and the only other form of advertising available was the town crier.’
In the 1870s, everything changed. ‘French printer and artist Jules Chéret developed the lithographic stone, which can be quite a large size and produced big, colour posters, the likes of which had never been seen before,’ explains Richard. ‘Posters exploded throughout the 1880s, 1890s and onwards. It was a fantastic form of advertising. When the railway industry discovered this, a huge number of posters were produced, advertising specific places and railway lines. The aviation industry, the car industry, biscuit manufacturers, alcoholic drink producers – they all followed suit, using posters to reach consumers.’
It’s easy to assume that since posters were printed in multiples and in such vast quantities, the market must be awash with them today but, in fact, good-quality posters are rare. ‘Posters were created initially to be pasted on a wall, then taken down in a week or a month so the next one could be put up – or they were just pasted over,’ Richard explains. ‘Generally, older posters are quite large and they were printed on thin, cheap paper. As a result, a lot of them didn’t survive.’
Fragility is an issue, and Richard advises collectors to ensure that posters they
