Journal
Notes on coffee in art
Deep-dives on single pieces, comparative essays on the artists and printers who worked the same genre, short histories of the institutions whose collections we draw from, and practical notes on putting one of these pieces on a wall.
Vienna, Prague, Budapest: Eastern European Art Nouveau coffee design
Around 1900 Vienna, Prague, and Budapest ran their own Art Nouveau coffee cultures. Vienna gave the Secession and the geometric restraint of the Wiener Werkstätte; Prague absorbed
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The home espresso corner: three pieces, no more
A home espresso corner needs three pieces, not twelve: one larger statement image and two smaller supporting pieces, framed identically and hung tight above the machine. It marks t
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German Jugendstil and the Munich coffee poster
Jugendstil — the German-language form of Art Nouveau, centred on Munich and named after the Munich weekly Jugend (founded 1896) — gave coffee and beverage advertising a flatter, bo
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Hanging a 12-piece cafe wall: step-by-step
A twelve-piece coffee wall reads as curated when it is built on a grid: equal frame sizes, equal gaps, and a single centre line. Lay the whole thing out on the floor first, measure
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Italian futurism and coffee advertising, 1910–1930
Italian Futurism (founded by Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto) glorified speed, the machine, and the modern city — and coffee, the fuel of the new urban espresso bar, was a natural fit.
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Matching frame stock across multiple archival pieces
To make a mixed set of archival coffee pieces read as one collection, match the frames, not the images. One frame profile, one mat colour, one mat width across everything unifies d
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Art Deco coffee design: French, Italian, and Eastern European, 1920–1930
Art Deco coffee design (roughly 1920–1935) replaced Art Nouveau’s curves and Cappiello’s black-ground figure with geometry, flat colour, and integrated lettering. Named for the 192
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A visual history of coffee advertising, 1880–1930
Between 1880 and 1930 coffee advertising moved through four visual phases: the ornamental Art Nouveau poster of the Belle Époque; the single-figure Cappiello-style brand hook of th
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Chéret, Cappiello, and the French coffee poster tradition
The French coffee poster has two fathers. Jules Chéret (1836–1932) invented the modern colour poster in the 1870s and filled Paris with joyous, crowded lithographs; Leonetto Cappie
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Albert Anker and the Swiss domestic coffee genre
Albert Anker (1831–1910), Switzerland’s best-loved genre painter, made coffee a recurring fixture of ordinary village life: the pot on the family table, the old man at the grinder,
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Designing a specialty cafe interior with archival coffee art
A specialty café interior built on archival coffee art reads as curated rather than themed when it follows three rules: choose pieces that share a period, a place, or a printing te
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CA-001 deep dive: Privat-Livemont’s Rajah, 1898–1899
Henri Privat-Livemont’s Rajah is the canonical Belle Époque coffee poster: chromolithographed at the Goffin workshop in Brussels for a small Belgian colonial-import house, and the
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The orientalist question in Belle Époque coffee advertising
An editorial position. Belle Époque coffee posters borrowed an exoticist visual register to sell beans grown in colonial territories. Why we include the work, why we don't romantic
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How to print and frame a coffee poster: a paper, mat, and frame walkthrough
A practical step-by-step on producing the actual physical print: paper choice, print shop, mat colour, frame stock, and the small decisions that separate a coffee poster that hangs
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What ‘public domain’ means for coffee art today
What public-domain status actually grants the buyer, what we add on top through restoration and curation, and where the legal lines sit in 2026.
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Ottoman coffeehouses in European travel lithography, 1820–1880
The 19th-century European travel artists who produced the visual record of Ottoman coffeehouses — what they got right, what they got wrong, and how to read the pictures honestly.
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How chromolithography made the coffee poster possible
The technical history of the printing technology behind every Belle Époque coffee poster — chromolithography — explained from the workshop's side.
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Where these images come from: a tour of the source institutions
The eight institutional sources that supply the archive, what each is strong on, and why the multi-source approach matters.
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Brazilian fazenda paintings: Ferrigno, Norfini, and São Paulo’s coffee art, 1890–1920
The Italian-Brazilian painters who documented the São Paulo coffee plantations at the moment of peak production. Visually rich, historically dense, and uncomfortable in ways the ar
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Coffea arabica in 19th-century botanical illustration
Where the botanical plates of the coffee plant come from — the scientific-illustration tradition, the engravers and lithographers who produced them, and what a real botanical plate
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Why archival coffee posters belong on a cafe wall in 2026
A direct case for using real institutional archival material on specialty cafe interiors, instead of the mass-produced 'vintage coffee print' template that fills Etsy and Amazon.
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Henri Privat-Livemont and the Brussels print culture, 1895–1910
A short biography of the Belgian designer behind the canonical coffee Rajah, and the small Brussels print circle that produced most of the era's coffee, chocolate, and tobacco post
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How to hang a Belle Époque coffee poster: paper, mat, frame
A short, opinionated guide to printing and framing a Belle Époque coffee poster so it reads the way it was designed to read.
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A short visual history of European coffee posters, 1885–1920
The thirty-five-year window from 1885 to 1920 produced almost every coffee poster anyone now thinks of as a 'vintage coffee poster.' This is the visual map of why.
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Two Rajahs: Privat-Livemont and Meunier in Brussels, 1897–1899
Two Belgian Art Nouveau posters share the name Rajah and belong to the same brand, but were designed two years apart by different artists. Both belong in this archive.
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