Théâtre du Chat Noir — Cover with Cyclamens — George Auriol, 1894

Piece №007
  Belle Époque cabaret program cover

Historical context

Le Chat Noir — the Black Cat — was the most famous cabaret in 19th-century Paris: founded by Rodolphe Salis in Montmartre in 1881, closed in 1897. It published a weekly journal, ran its own shadow theater, and printed a different program cover for almost every performance. George Auriol designed dozens of those covers between roughly 1888 and 1895.

This is the Couverture aux cyclamens (Cyclamen Cover), 1894. The visual vocabulary — flat color, asymmetric composition, the Japanese-print sense of negative space — is pure Art Nouveau as filtered through japonisme. Auriol and his collaborators (Steinlen, Bonnard, Vallotton) all worked from the same Hokusai prints that were circulating Paris in the 1880s.

Technically the cover is a color lithograph, three or four stones, registered by hand. The Chat Noir programs were printed in modest editions (a few hundred per night), distributed at the door, and discarded by most audiences — the surviving copies are mostly in the Bibliothèque nationale’s Leroy-Crèvecœur donation. Reference: Leroy-Crèvecœur, no. 25.

Auriol’s monogram (GA) appears in the lower right. He later became one of the most influential French type designers of the early 20th century; the asymmetric letterforms here are direct ancestors of his published typefaces. The cyclamen motif itself reads as Hokusai — broken stems, blossoms tilted off the vertical, the calligraphic line.

The file is a 7314 × 5395 px high-resolution scan from Gallica, the BnF’s digital archive. The program itself measured around 30 × 24 cm; the file comfortably supports 16 × 20 inch and larger prints. We’d recommend this piece small to medium — the composition rewards close reading, not wall-filling scale.

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