Theatre poster for A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go

Theatre poster for Oswald Allan's pantomine A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go
Marylebone Theatre, London
24 December, 1875
Printed by Williams & Strahan
Woodcut and letterpress
Museum no. S.598-1996
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

This poster advertised the pantomime at the Marylebone Theatre for Christmas 1875, a version of The Sleeping Beauty. Like most Victorian pantomimes, it featured Harlequin and Columbine and had the full title A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go, or, Harlequin Sleeping Beauty and the Wicked Demons of the Mystic Pool. Victorians loved long and complicated names for pantomimes - the longer the title, the more fun it seemed to promise. In contrast to the elaborate name of the pantomime, the poster is remarkably simple and striking. It features a large picture of a frog flunkey, with a letter addressed to King Frog. It was produced by a woodcut - an image laboriously cut out from a block of wood, which was printed in black ink and then coloured by hand. It doesn't seem surprising to us today because we are so used to large, coloured images, but for its time, this was unusual and expensive publicity.

Poster advertising Blondin at Crystal Palace

Poster advertising Blondin at Crystal Palace
London, 1860s
Museum no. S.71-1981
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

This poster advertising the French tightrope walker Blondin, was remarkably bold for its time, featuring a large woodcut image of the famous performer. By 1869 Blondin was a regular feature at the Crystal Palace. When the proposal to hire him had first been made in 1862, one of the directors was concerned about the bad publicity that an accident might provoke. ‘Suppose he was to fall?’ ‘Blondin, fall from a rope!’ replied Harry Coleman, his manager, ‘He can’t’. Blondin was offered a fee of £1,200, four times as much as the next highest paid performer. This specially adapted bicycle, or velociped was one of the props he invented to keep the act from becoming stale. In the 1960s, 100 years after its invention, Blondin’s grandson found his grandfather’s velociped for sale in a London junk shop. Another prop used by Blondin, a wheelbarrow with a grooved wheel to keep it on the rope, is in the Museum's collections.

Poster for Yeoman of the Guard

<p> Poster for D&#39;Oyly Carte Opera Company&#39;s&#39;Yeoman of the Guard, illustration by Dudley Hardy (1867-1922), printed by David Allen &amp; Sons Ltd, Savoy Theatre, London, 1897</p>

Poster for D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's'Yeoman of the Guard
Savoy Theatre, London, 1897
Illustration by Dudley Hardy (1867-1922)
Printed by David Allen & Sons Ltd
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

This poster was designed by Dudley Hardy for the first revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre in 1897 and was used on its own or as part of an enormous hoarding poster for the D'Oyly Carte Company, along with his posters for The Mikado and The Gondoliers. Hardy trained as a painter, but he is best known as a poster artist. Unlike some artists who felt that poster design was an inferior branch of art, Hardy felt passionately that artists should not restrict their work to framed paintings and that poster artists had no better critical audience than the public who could see poster art on the streets. Hardy was influenced in his work by the great French poster artist Jules Cheret, whose posters he had seen in Paris. Some of Hardy’s work is as exuberant as Cheret’s, but this is altogether more sombre and striking an image, upholding his view that poster art should be as simple and striking as possible, with very little background or detail, ‘to arrest the eye of the passer-by’.

Theatre poster for Human Nature

Theatre poster for Henry Pettitt and Augustus Harris' melodrama Human Nature
Drury Lane Theatre, London
1885
Colour lithograph.
Museum no. S.9-1983
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

This is one of two different pictorial posters that advertised Human Nature, one of Drury Lane’s autumn melodramas presented by Augustus Harris. These late 19th-century Drury Lane melodramas were spectacular affairs with improbable plots, with posters reflecting key dramatic moments. Here, the wronged wife Lady Temple is seen pleading with the manipulative schemer Cora Grey, who reclines on a chaise longue. A copy of the Lady's Pictorial lies on the floor beside her, indicating that a woman who has time to read illustrated magazines must be up to no good. To emphasise the point, the artist has included Lady Temple's pleading words 'Give me back my husband'. The introduction of lithography for posters meant that artists could reproduce freely drawn images, impossible with the earlier wood-engravings. This type of image still has the feeling of a book illustration though, in contrast to the bolder, more uncomplicated poster style of later poster artists such as Dudley Hardy and John Hassall.

Theatre poster for The Only Way: A Tale of Two Cities

Theatre poster for The Only Way: A Tale of Two Cities
Lyceum Theatre, London
16 February, 1899
Illustration by John Hassall (1868-1948
Printed by David Allen & Sons Ltd
Museum no. S.15-1983
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

This poster for The Only Way, a version of Charles Dickens’ story A Tale of Two Cities, produced at the Lyceum Theatre in 1899, was designed by the prolific poster artist John Hassall. Hassall's work was appealing and commercial; he worked fast and by 1899 had designed over 600 posters as well as producing illustrations for nursery rhymes and fairy stories. He was convinced that two dimensional poster could be one of the most dramatic forms of art. He admired the posters of the French artist Toulouse Lautrec, and Japanese woodcut prints. That influence can be seen here, in the dramatic horizontal and vertical lines of the scaffold, and the stark white areas of Sidney Carton’s coat. The blades in the foreground force him on to meet the blade of the scaffold; the red cap thrust high suggests dripping blood, while the dramatic sunset emphasises the dark mood and foreshadows the execution which ends the play.