In the foregoing chapters, I have attempted to outline the history of art as applied to the poster, and to give an account of the pictorial placard in the present state of its development. The number of names, eminent in the history of various modern arts and crafts, who have applied themselves to the production of the pictorial poster seems to me to justify the publication of this book. The fact that men so highly endowed as Chéret and Lautrec deliberately choose to appeal to the public chiefly by means of the affiche, well knowing that their gallery is the common hoarding, places the illustrated poster outside the bounds of ridicule. A modern art critic of high repute and of enormous energy has assured us that, in these days, to neglect the poster is mere folly on the part of those who care for the application of taste and skill to the objects of everyday life. We are apt to talk of artistic periods; periods when the most ordinary objects had an aesthetic character of their own. It seems to me to be full of promise for the future that the hoarding should be among the first necessities of modern civilization to be rendered charming by the skill and imagination of the artist. Art is generally supposed to be inimical to commerce, and commerce inimical to art, yet here we have the two combining to the advantage of both, and succeeding in making the beautiful an incident of the necessary.
