Historical context
Henri Privat-Livemont was Brussels’ most prominent Art Nouveau poster designer at the turn of the twentieth century. He painted Rajah in 1898–1899 as a commercial poster for a Belgian coffee brand of the same name. The brand itself was small; no surviving roaster archive is firmly attributed to it, and the poster outlived the product.
The work belongs to the orientalist commercial iconography that dominated European coffee, tea, and tobacco advertising between roughly 1890 and 1914 — turbaned male figures, jewel palettes, ornamental flora that owed more to Parisian printing studios than to anywhere east of Vienna.
Technically the piece is a chromolithograph — multiple limestone plates, one per color, hand-registered. The 1899 edition was printed at the Goffin workshop in Brussels, the standard house for Privat-Livemont’s commercial work. Original prints ran roughly 100 × 50 cm.
The file held by the Google Cultural Institute is the maximum-zoom scan from a high-resolution photographic capture of an original copy. At 1776 × 3256 px it carries enough information for a full poster-scale print without visible loss. At smaller sizes the ornamental border has more presence than the figure; print large or not at all.
Catalog
| Artist | Henri Privat-Livemont Belgian, 1861–1936 |
|---|---|
| Title | Rajah |
| Year | 1898–1899 |
| Medium | Chromolithograph on paper |
| Original size | ≈ 100 × 50 cm |
| Holding | Google Cultural Institute (max-zoom scan) |
| License | Public Domain |
| Archive № | CA-001 |
Print specifications
For desktop / shelf placement. Use a matte fine-art paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag or equivalent) — the chromolithograph palette suffers on gloss. Frame with a 4 cm white or warm-cream mat.
The size the piece was designed to be read at. A wide mat (6–8 cm) and a slim warm-toned frame (oak, walnut) read better than thin gallery black. The Rajah figure rewards eye-level placement.
The closest reproduction to a 1899 Goffin printing. Use heavyweight matte poster paper, museum-grade if framing under glass. At this scale the ornamental border becomes the dominant compositional element — leave it room.
Source statement
Digital source: high-resolution photographic capture of an original copy held by an institutional partner of the Google Cultural Institute, accessed via Wikimedia Commons. The work entered public domain by virtue of the artist’s death in 1936 (Belgium, life + 70).
Original work: Henri Privat-Livemont (1861–1936), Rajah, chromolithograph, 1898–1899. Printed Brussels, Goffin workshop.
Restoration notes. Minor scan-edge cleanup; color balance preserved from source. No reconstructive retouching applied to the figure or border.
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