When were posters first used and why?

The history of posters can be traced as far back as the 15th century, when artisans handmade each and every sheet. While a painstaking process indeed, it ushered in a new age of providing news, announcements, and other information to passers-by on the streets.

For the most part, news and information was distributed to the populace via the Town Crier. Town criers traversed the streets and would stop at crossroads, announcing the orders and proclamations from the King, the Church or the brotherhoods. They announced everything from burials, goods, convocations, lost objects, and other items.

In 1539, the "poster" began to slowly but surely replace the town criers. Jean-Michel Papillon was one of the first "poster artists" that can be tracked via his signature.

In Paris of 1628, Théophraste Renaudot (a French Protestant physician) created his "Bureau d'adresses". His company listed small advertisements indexing suppliers and buyers of various products. In 1633, after several years of success, he printed loose sleeves reproducing this information under the name of "Sheets of the Bureau d'adresses". This represented the beginnings of the advertising poster.

In 1789, the French revolution caused a virtual explosion in the field of communications. The French began to experience "Freedom of the Press", and all of the newspapers began displaying printed advertisements.

The formidable industrial rise of the 19th century ushered in the beginnings of mechanization, which opened a new area in publishing.

The greatest illustrators of the period, Grandville, Raffet, Johannot, Gavarni, and Gilded partnered with the great writers, Hugo, Sand, Dumas, Rabelais, Balzac.

Like most print media, graphic arts were dependent on the invention of the printing press. This allowed for the mass production of all shapes and sizes of posters as well. The technique that is used to print posters, is called lithography. This is printing by placing ink on a series of metal or stone ("lithos") carvings which are really reliefs of color regions on the poster.

The art of Lithography was invented by Czech named Alois Senefelder in 1798 in Austria. By 1848, the process had been refined to the point that it was possible to print 10,000 sheers per hour, however, Jules Cheret was the first person to produce posters in mass through lithography.

While Senefelder pioneered the field of lithography, and certainly many "posters" were created prior to the arrival of Cheret, it is Cheret deserves to be called "the father of the poster". First, his contributions to the technical process made rapid color printing in volume possible. Second, he played a major role in the transformation of the aesthetic nature of the poster, giving it an identity and autonomy from all other fields of pictorial art.