Outlet Pamono The Beggarstaffs, Hamlet from Les Maîtres de L’Affiche, 1898, Original Lithograph

William Nicholson (1872-1949) and
James Pryde (1966-1941)
a.k.a. The Beggarstaffs (1894-1899)

Hamlet

Year: 1898
Lithograph on wove paper
Publisher: Chaix

Signed in the plate, lower left

from the famous collection “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche”
Issue # 27, Plate #107, February 1898

Bottom left:
Les Maîtres de l’Affiche PL. 107
Imprimerie Chaix
(Encres Lorilleux & Cie.)

Bottom right, blind stamp of publisher / edition

Excellent Condition

Literature:
“The Complete Masters of the Poster”, edited by Stanley Appelbaum, Dover, New York, 1990, p. 107
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About the collection “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche”

Les Maîtres de l’Affiche (The Masters of the Poster) is one of the most prestigious and influential art publications in history Its 256 color plates have preserved for each succeeding generation a wide-ranging selection of outstanding posters from the turn of the century, when that popular art form had reached its first peak.

The earliest printed posters were chiefly typographic, with relatively few illustrated examples. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, when all types of commercial products, including printed matter, were being aesthetically upgraded, largely thanks to various arts-and-crafts movements, serious artists such as Manet began to see new possibilities in the poster medium. It was especially Jules Chéret (1836-1932) whose unique combination of artistic, technical and entrepreneurial talents was to pave the way for a true poster industry. After Chéret opened his own print shop in Paris in 1866, his work continued to inspire numerous emulators in Europe and America. from 1881 on, his shop operated as a branch of the large Chaix firm (Imprimerie Chaix)

By the 1890s the streets of every great metropolis were enlivened by large, colourful posters.
This Chaix publication, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, was issued as separate numbered sheets measuring 40 x 29 cm. Every month for 60 months, from December 1895 through November 1900, subscribers received a wrapper containing four consecutively numbered poster. On 16 occasions the monthly wrapper also contained a bonus plate, a specially created art lithograph. Jules Chéret, artistic director of Chaix and father of the modern poster, emerged with the lion’s share of the plates, one Chéret being included in each monthly issue of four, and seven of the 16 unnumbered bonus plates.

Of the 97 artists represented in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, some were preeminent painters and printmakers at various stages of their careers: Toulouse-Lautrec, Denis, Bonnard, Vallotton, Puvis de Chavannes. Others were famous illustrators and cartoonists of the period, still well known to art collectors and bibliophiles. Forain, Caran d’Ache, Ibels, Willette, Boutet de Monvel, Léandre. But there were also all those whose names say “poster,” the conquering pioneers of the new medium. Chéret himself, Mucha, Steinlen, the Beggarstaffs, Grasset, Penfield, Parrish, Bradley, Hardy The list could go on and on.
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About the Artists and this Artwork
The Story behind Beggarstaff’s Hamlet

The Beggarstaffs, otherwise J. & W. Beggarstaff, was the pseudonym used by the British artists William Nicholson and James Pryde for their collaborative partnership in the design of posters and other graphic work between 1894 and 1899. They are sometimes referred to as the Beggarstaff Brothers, but did not use this name.

William Nicholson met his future wife Mabel “Prydie” Pryde in 1888 or 1889 at Hubert Herkomer’s art school at Bushey, Herts, where both were students. He met her elder brother James, who was also an artist, at about the same time. In 1893, Nicholson and Prydie eloped and were secretly married at Ruislip on 25 April. They went to live in what had been a pub, the Eight Bells at Denham, Bucks. James Pryde soon visited them, and stayed for almost two years. In the summer of 1894 Craig was preparing to go on tour with the Shakespearean Company of W.S. Hardy, for whom he was to play, among other roles, that of Hamlet. The part was an important one for him, and he asked Pryde and Nicholson to design and produce a poster to publicise the production. It was their first collaboration.

The initial design was made partly by collage, the hair and clothing of Craig as Hamlet cut from plain black paper; the life-sized figure in the printed version used to publicise the play was stencilled on brown wrapping-paper by Nicholson, with some details added by hand. The original design is untraced; however, it was reproduced in four publications: in the Magazine of Art, La Plume, Pictorial Posters, Pan and in The Poster. No copy of the theatrical poster used to publicise the play is known to survive, but its appearance is known from its publication in Pan in February 1896, on page 333; it has “W.S. Hardy’s Company” lettered across the top and is unsigned. Another version of the poster, signed but without the “Hardy’s” lettering, may have been produced for sale to collectors. An example is in the Museum of Modern Art of New York City; this version is the one printed in 1898 in Paris by the Imprimerie Chaix as plate 107 of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, our plate here.

The last version of the Hamlet poster is signed, by hand, “J. W. Beggarstaff Denham Uxbridge”. According to Nicholson, the Beggarstaff pseudonym was chosen after “Pryde and I came across it one day in an old stable, on a sack of fodder”; Pryde gave a similar, though slightly different, explanation.
At about the same time, the Beggarstaffs designed and printed a poster showing Craig in another of his leading rôles on the same tour with Hardy’s company, that of Charles Surface in Sheridan’s School for Scandal. It also was probably stencilled on brown paper. It does not survive in any form; Craig described it as “absolutely splendid”.

The Hamlet poster was shown at the International Artistic Pictorial Poster Exhibition at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster in November 1894.

Important:

. The listing is for the original lithograph.
. The cover of the issue by Jules Chéret is shown for reference.