1895
American
Works On Paper
Prints
commercial lithograph poster
United States
Sheet: 48 5/8 × 60 in. (123.51 × 152.4 cm)
Framed: 53 7/8 × 66 7/8 × 2 in. (136.84 × 169.86 × 5.08 cm)
90.92
Not on view

English-born Louis John Rhead moved to New York in 1883, where he became one of America’s most popular poster designers. He took inspiration from the French Art Nouveau designer Eugène Grasset, whose use of color and broad outlines is also visible in Rhead’s own saturated composition and stylized figures. Publisher William Randolph Hearst acquired the New York Morning Journal in 1895 and in order to contend with rival newspapers, he commissioned Rhead to design this poster to advertise the journal’s new management, as well as its competitive new price of 1 cent.

Signed at lower right center: "L. J. R."
Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund and Sydney and Frances Lewis Endowment Fund
Frederick Brandt, Designed to Sell: Turn of the Century American Posters, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1994
La Plume, 1 January, 1896, No. 161, p. 16
Jean Louis Sponsel, Das Moderne Plakat, 1897
The Studio, 1896, Vol. 8
Image released via Creative Commons CC-BY-NC

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