Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Dehaynin 1912 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello Dehaynin 1912 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A scarlet devil head, horns swept back, green eyes fixed forward and fanged mouth releasing twin plumes of white-orange flame, fills a yellow-gold circle against a flat black ground. Two tiny silhouetted figures stand at the base of the composition amid coal or rubble, the scale of the devil making them near-invisible. DEHAYNIN in grass-green slab-serif capitals runs above; PRIX D'ETE in the same weight below; the address 188, Faubg St Martin in warm gold completes the composition.
Designed by Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) and printed by Imprimerie Vercasson, Paris, around 1912. The client was Dehaynin, a Paris coal and fuel merchant at 188 Faubourg Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. Prix d'Été, summer prices, was a seasonal promotion: a fuel company discounting its product during the one part of the year when demand collapsed. Cappiello's solution was characteristically direct. He reached for his most reliable device: a figure of fire and menace, isolated against black, at a scale that demanded the eye. The composition belongs to a sequence that includes the Maurin Quina green devil (1906) and the Thermogène fire-breather (1909); all were produced under Cappiello's long contract with printer Pierre Vercasson.
The red-and-green complementary pairing, the circular vignette, and the complete suppression of background are the hallmarks of Cappiello's mature Vercasson-period style, a style that effectively ended the decorative, detail-laden conventions of Belle Époque poster design and replaced them with a single image, a dark ground, and nothing else. This poster is one of the lesser-exhibited works from that period, held in major French institutional collections including the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Reproduced from a carefully restored archival source as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. For collectors of early twentieth-century French graphic design and anyone following Cappiello's development across the Vercasson years.
