Printing history

THE making of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters involved a number of people beyond the artist himself. While the images would not exist without their primary maker, they nevertheless could not have been produced as lithographs without the participation of printers, publishers, distributors, and others, who can be described as secondary makers.
 

Like the artist, they left their marks, in the form of names, initials, insignia, and stamps which are visible on the prints themselves. These are clues to the prints' technical and social histories and integral parts of their character as physical objects.

On occasion Lautrec published his own editions, paying the costs for paper, inks, and printing, and overseeing sales. But more often he was commissioned to make an image by a publisher who paid for his design, assumed the productions costs and distribution, and returned to the artist a percentage of the sales and profits. Most of Lautrec's commissions came through his friends and artistic associates, or related to his own interests.

Lautrec never printed his own lithographs, relying on a number of commercial firms whose names are printed in small type or insignia along the edges of the posters. The names Bougerie et Cie., Chaix, and Verneau appear on certain posters, but the artist's primary association was with the firm of Edward Ancourt. Because it used small hand presses, Ancourt printed mainly smaller posters and prints in small editions without text for the collectors' market. When Ancourt did produce large posters, they were printed on two sheets of paper, the joints clearly visible.

Lautrec's favorite printer at Ancourt was Henri Stern, to whom he regularly dedicated one impression from each edition Stern printed. The Baldwin Collection presents one of these rare impressions in The Chap Book (see Signatures and marks), which Lautrec inscribed "á Henri T-Lautrec."

Eventually Stern left Ancourt and started his own business. His name alone appears on some of the later small, privately commissioned works of Lautrec.

The size of poster editions for commercial use was about two thousand (most of which were actually plastered to walls, and thus no longer exist.)

Generally if a poster was to be hung out of doors and to bear the address of the advertiser, French law (although inconsistently applied) required a tax stamp authorizing its display. The practice of papering poster bills one next to another may stand as a factor behind the extraordinary strength and colors of Lautrec's designs; his work had to actively compete for attention (see Color and technique).

Huge steam-driven presses were required for the commercial poster editions. Lautrec's smaller stones were physically transported from the Ancourt presses to another firm capable of printing such long runs. If his stones were too large, impressions of each were made on paper and transferred to new stones at another printing shop. As for the texts of the posters, some were designed and executed by Lautrec himself; some came from other hands. A few suffer from the imposition of mechanical type.

Many of Lautrec's extant posters do not bear text and were intended as works of art for collectors. Poster dealers advertised Lautrec's posters for sale to collectors as early as 1892. These were generally backed with linen and bore no tax stamp. As mentioned above, small pre-text runs of posters were even printed specifically for the collector's market. That Lautrec was able to transcend the commercial purposes for which much of his graphic art was commissioned, creating works of art that have stimulated the acquisitive urges of collectors for almost a hundred years, is just one sign of his seminal influence on printmaking and design.

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