Tournée du Chat Noir - Théophile Steinlen, 1896, Montmartre Cabaret Poster

In the autumn of 1881, a flamboyant impresario named Rodolphe Salis opened a small cabaret at 84 Boulevard de Rochechouart in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris. He called it Le Chat Noir — The Black Cat — and within a few years it had become the most famous and influential entertainment venue in the world. Poets, painters, composers, and intellectuals crowded its smoky rooms every night. Toulouse-Lautrec sketched there. Erik Satie played piano there. It was the beating heart of the Belle Époque avant-garde.

Le Chat Noir’s greatest innovation was its Shadow Theater — le théâtre d’ombres — a revolutionary form of entertainment using intricately cut zinc silhouettes, colored glass, and projected light to create stunning visual performances behind a backlit screen. Audiences were transfixed. Nothing like it had been seen before, and it drew crowds from across Europe and beyond. From 1892, Salis took the Shadow Theater on tour across France and into French-speaking countries including Belgium, Tunisia, and Algeria, bringing the magic of Montmartre to audiences who could never make it to Paris.

It was for one of these tours that the Swiss-born artist Théophile Steinlen created this poster in 1896. Steinlen was one of the great masters of Belle Époque poster art — a passionate observer of Parisian street life, a champion of the working class, and a supreme draughtsman. His iconic image of the black cat, silhouetted against a luminous golden background, is one of the most instantly recognizable images in the history of graphic art. Bold, mysterious, and utterly modern, it captured the spirit of Le Chat Noir in a single unforgettable image.

Le Chat Noir closed in 1897, shortly after Salis’ death. But Steinlen’s poster lived on — and has never stopped being reproduced, collected, and admired in the century and a quarter since.

Giclee reproductions on luster premium photo paper.