Advertisements

Advertising as a distinct visual practice — the deliberate use of designed imagery to promote goods and services to a mass audience — emerged in the eighteenth century and reached its first great flowering in the decades around 1900. The antique prints and illustrations in this collection trace that development from the trade cards of Georgian merchants to the chromolithographic posters and promotional imagery of the Edwardian era, documenting the visual history of commercial culture at one of its most inventive and prolific periods.

The trade card was the dominant form of commercial advertising imagery in the eighteenth century. Produced by engravers working for the full range of London’s commercial trades — grocers, haberdashers, instrument makers, apothecaries, coach builders — trade cards combined the merchant’s address and trading information with an engraved image that might depict the goods sold, an allegorical figure appropriate to the trade, or simply an ornamental border of high quality. The finest trade cards of the Georgian period are minor masterpieces of the engraver’s art, and they document the material culture and commercial geography of eighteenth-century urban life with a specificity that no other source can match.

Newspaper and broadsheet advertising developed alongside the trade card, and the illustrated advertisements that appeared in the popular press from the late eighteenth century onwards provide a different kind of visual record — less refined than the trade card, but more immediate and more closely tied to the commercial events and products of a specific moment. These images record the goods available, the prices charged and the promotional language used by traders at a time when the vocabulary of commercial persuasion was still being invented.

The development of chromolithography from the 1860s onwards transformed commercial advertising imagery. For the first time, it became possible to produce illustrated promotional material in full colour at commercial scale, and the results were immediate and dramatic. Chromolithographic trade cards, posters, packaging and promotional prints flooded the market, deploying the full range of pictorial convention — narrative scenes, allegorical figures, portrait celebrities, comic illustration — in the service of commercial promotion. The best examples of chromolithographic advertising art are objects of considerable visual quality, and they are collected both for their graphic appeal and as documents of consumer culture at its Victorian and Edwardian peak.

Advertising illustration also developed a documentary function: images depicting the manufacture, distribution and consumption of goods provided both promotional content and a visual record of industrial and commercial processes that is invaluable to historians of technology and material culture. Factory views, process illustrations and images of commercial premises produced for advertising purposes often preserve information about the physical world of industry that survives in no other form.

For collectors, antique advertising prints offer material of exceptional variety — spanning trades, products, periods, printing technologies and graphic styles — and a direct connection to the commercial world that shaped modern consumer culture. They are collected by social historians, graphic design historians, and those attracted to the visual energy of commercial art at its most uninhibited.