Auguste Racinet

Auguste Racinet

Oct 18, 2025

Albert Racinet

(1825 - 1893)

Auguste Racinet

(1825 - 1893)

Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet himself an accomplished artist, is best known today for publishing two major pictorial works on the history of design — Le costume historique and L'Ornement polychrome — while engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. Published in ten instalments between 1869 and 1873, the first iteration of L'Ornement polychrome (Colour ornament) is a visual record in 100 plates of the decorative arts from antiquity to the eighteenth century.

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The work was such a huge success that in 1885–7 Racinet brought out a second series, this time of 120 plates, and updated to include designs of the nineteenth century as well. The imagery presented in both series is drawn from a wide array of various mediums, including woodwork, metalwork, architecture, textiles, painting, and pottery, and from cultures all over the world.

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E. A. Séguy

E. A. Séguy

Oct 18, 2025

E. A. Séguy

(1890 - 1985)

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Emile-Allain Séguy, professionally known as E.A. Séguy, was a French designer during the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements of the 1920s. He primarily created patterns and textiles inspired by the natural world. Because of his particular fascination with insects, he has been confused with Eugene Séguy, a French entomologist active during the same time period. However, it is Emile-Allain who created the popular Papillons and Insectes books, filled with illustrations of vividly colored butterflies and insects made using the pochoir—French for “stencil”—technique.

Seguy’s albums were created using a unique printing process called pochoir, which was popular in France at the turn of the 20th century. Pochoir is a process that utilizes the method of applying pigment to paper through the use of stencils. First, the artist created an image in watercolor or gouache. The design was then analyzed to determine the necessary colors and number of stencils needed. The stencils could be cut from any number of materials, including copper, zinc, oiled cardboard, or celluloid. The paint was applied through the stencils by brushes or pompons. The prints were produced entirely by hand assembly line style, and each one was individually examined and approved upon completion.

While simple in concept, pochoir could become quite complex in practice, with some images requiring the use of 100 or so stencils to produce a single print. The technique was regularly used to produce plates in French fashion journals as well as being used to illustrate industrial design, textile, interiors, and architecture folios.

Pochoir is thought to be a reaction to what was seen as a general debasement of machine printing technology during the time period. Jean Saudé, the individual who most influenced the pochoir technique, believed that pochoir was the only process which translated the artist’s original intent because it was entirely done by hand.

Pochoir is thought to be a reaction to what was seen as a general debasement of machine printing technology during the time period. Jean Saudé, the individual who most influenced the pochoir technique, believed that pochoir was the only process which translated the artist’s original intent because it was entirely done by hand.

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Edward Penfield

Edward Penfield

Oct 17, 2025

Edward Penfield

(1866 - 1925)
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Edward Penfield received his training at the Art Students League in New York City. He went on to become the art director at Harper's magazine and also designed a series of monthly posters for Harper's that won enormous critical acclaim. By the turn of the century, Penfield's reputation as an important graphic designer was assured.

 

The Harper's posters have been characterized as the definitive graphic works of the 1890s. Penfield took full advantage of recent improvements in color printing to create works that were effective vehicles of communication and also aesthetically engaging. Less concerned with the dramatic curving lines of Art Nouveau than his contemporary Will Bradley, Penfield synthesized a number of stylistic sources in his work, including Japanese prints and those of French artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret.

After leaving Harper's in 1901, Penfield continued to be extremely active in both design and illustration. In addition to posters for other magazines including Scribner's and Collier's, he executed illustrations and covers for many books and generated designs for numerous commercial concerns. Together with Will Bradley, Penfield was instrumental in creating the rich fabric of American graphic design work in the 1890s.

Source—Therese Thau Heyman Posters American Style (New York and Washington, D.C.: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the National Museum of American Art, 1998)

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Leonetto Cappiello

Leonetto Cappiello

Oct 17, 2025

Leonetto Cappiello

(1875 - 1942)

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Leonetto Cappiello (9 April 1875 – 2 February 1942) was an Italian and French poster art designer and painter, who mainly lived and worked in Paris. He is now often called 'the father of modern advertising' because of his innovation in poster design. The early advertising poster was characterized by a painterly quality as evidenced by early poster artists Jules Chéret, Alfred Choubrac and Hugo D'Alesi. Cappiello, like other young artists, worked in a way that was almost the opposite of his predecessors. He was the first poster artist to use bold figures popping out of black backgrounds, a startling contrast to posters' early norm.

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Erté

Erté

Oct 17, 2025

Erté

(1892 - 1990)

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Romain de Tirtoff, known by the pseudonym Erté, was a Russian-born French artist and designer. He worked in several fields, including fashion, jewellery, graphic arts, costume, set design for film, theatre, and opera, and interior decor.

His work is quintessentially emblematic of the Art Deco style in its use of tapering lines and simplified ornamentation inspired by the natural world, and his figurines are internationally known and desired as collectible objects.
Erté moved to Paris in 1910, disobeying his father’s wishes for him to become a naval officer. In 1915, he secured a contract with Harper’s Bazaar magazine, producing numerous illustrations and other media. Today, Erté’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He died on April 21, 1990 in Paris, France.