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The poster was made for an exhibit of one hundred important French paintings at the Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 1961. The image used for this exhibition is the "Portrait of Henry Bernstein as a young boy" by Edouard Manet done in 1881.

Henry Bernstein ( French 1876-1953)

Bernstein was a famous playwright who was known for a series of sensational melodramas. He was also known for his campaigns against Nazism and anti-Semitism. His anti-Nazi play Elvire played in Paris until the city fell to the Germans. The sailor’s suit depicted was popular in Europe and America in the 19th century.

Edouard Manet (French 1832-1883)  was a French painter who was active during the transition from realism to Impressionism which was a style of painting noted for its visible brush strokes. In the 1800s, Manet was one of the first artists to explore modern life; most of his work consisted of café and Parisian street scenes, character studies, social activities, and war. Unique to his painting style were his free, rough brush strokes, naturalistic lighting, and the way he outlined the human figure in black.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is a painting by Édouard Manet, considered to be his last major and most famous work. It was painted in 1882 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris. (It is my personal favorite of Manet's work, Greg)

"Manet was greatly influenced by the many Impressionist painters of his day, the two who had the greatest influence were Morisot  and Monet. This influence can be seen in his choice of using light colours, and in the plain air technique of painting. However, he still used the colour, black, in his paintings that set him aside from his fellow Impressionist artists. Manet painted many scenes of café life in Paris. Manet painted naturalistic scenes of everyday people drinking beer, reading, writing, chatting and listening to music. Manet would sketch the painting while he sat and observed the scene before him." (edouard-manet.net)

Fernand Mourlot (left) with Henri Matisse at Ateliers Mourlot, Paris

Ateliers Mourlot. In 1852, Francois Mourlot opened Ateliers Mourlot in Paris as a commercial print shop that primarily produced wallpaper. When Francois’s grandson Fernand Mourlot took over the shop in the 1920s, however, he converted it into a studio dedicated to the printing of illustrated books and lithographic posters. Though lithography had more or less gone out of style during the 19th century, Fernand brought it back with a single-mindedness that would change printmaking forever.

Over the next four decades, Fernand brought in the greatest Modernists of his day to produce color lithographs. French painters Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo were among the first to work with Mourlot, though it was not long before the atelier began to reach an even broader crowd including Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, and Fernand Léger. Lithographs were conceived as announcements for exhibitions, ads for tourism or even illustrations for political events that were posted throughout the streets of Europe, and in windows of shops and cafés. (Artnet.com)