JULES CHERET L'HORLOGE / LES GIRARD. 1879.

22 1/2x17 inches. Cheret, Paris.
Condition A-: minor restoration in image.
This is one of Cheret's rarest and most mythical posters. It was not offered by Sagot in his 1891 catalogue of posters, did not appear in the tremendous poster exhibition in Reims in 1896 (meaning it was not part of Alexandre Henriot's extensive collection) and has appeared at public auction only once in the past several decades! Cheret designed two versions of this poster for the Girards. The first, in 1877, when the troupe appeared at the Folies Bergere, had a red background, and the performers were in green. This version, printed two years later, simply inverted the colors. The image is extraordinarily modern, with its solid background, extravagant movement of the composition and the manner in which the unrealistically elongated limbs of the performers are entwined with the text. The image is actually a fair representation of their contortionist act, which Thetard, writing in the Merveilleuse Histoire de la Cirque described as "disarticulated from their legs." Inexplicably, having virtually created modern graphism with this poster (with the use of flat colors, the organization of the space and the distortion of the characters), Cheret chose instead to pursue his mastery of color lithography, which he certainly achieved, but in a more painterly way. Yet it was this image, as pointed out by the art critics Meyer Shapiro and Robert Herbert, that influenced Seurat in his painting, specifically referring to "Le Chahut" (1889-1890), where the vertical and oblique movements in the painting reflect Les Girards. Broido 158, Modern Poster 1, Word & Image p. 25.