Advertising and prestige
Job: smoke, hair and mosaic in a cigarette-paper poster
Mucha's Job poster turns a trademark, a cigarette and a cascade of hair into one ornamental system. This essay follows its lettering, smoke and gold line in deep zoom.
A trademark turned into a picture
JOB is the name of a brand of cigarette papers. According to the Mucha Foundation, the word is a trademark of the Joseph Bardou Company, a manufacturer of cigarette papers. The poster that Mucha made for it in the mid-1890s is catalogued in the gallery as Job, dated 1896, and it is printed with the imprint of F. Champenois, visible in the lower left corner of our reproduction beside Mucha’s signature at lower right. The same printing house appears in the gallery’s F. Champenois Imprimeur-Editeur.
Dates around this image are not entirely settled. The V&A dates its copy to about 1896, other museum and market records give 1897 or 1898, and the Mucha Foundation separately mentions a later, different design for the same client. The safest reading is that the composition belongs to the second half of the 1890s and that it was issued in more than one printing. The Foundation notes that numerous editions of the poster were published, which is part of why it is so widely known.
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