To-Day | Maitre de L’Affiche: Plate #216

This artwork is from Les Maitres de L’Affiche series; miniature versions of outstanding stone lithograph artworks of the most important advertising posters by the finest artists. “Dudley Hardy put on the walls of London for the magazine To-day, a yellow girl with sober contours, even a little angular, the effect achieved and on the white paper the figure standing out radiantly, to the detriment of chromos overloaded with colours in half tones. The yellow girl like the Gaiety Girl (see PL.4) which preceded her, was directly inspired by Cheret: She was too light-hearted, too irresponsible to be a girl of this grey skied rainy country. But she adapted very well, with rawer colours and less subtle outline than used by the French artists. Hardy soon became the fashionable poster maker…”(Weill p.67, 68) “The prolific English artist Dudley Hardy…really introduced the colour poster to England… His posters are strongly derivative of Cheret’s. Like Cheret he appreciated the advertising value of sex appeal, and his recurring subjects are legs, tutu’s, frou-frous and legs again. The range of expression and antic is between a frisky insouciance and a brassier glamour” (Rennert, PAI-XXIX, 397)