Vintage Poster Archives
Maison Poussier 1922 | Léon Husson Music Poster
Maison Poussier 1922 | Léon Husson Music Poster
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Four children fill a deep black stage around an upright piano: an accordion player perches on the lid, a blonde girl in white reads sheet music at the keys, a boy in a yellow suit draws a bow across his violin, and a fourth child in a checked suit blows a trumpet from atop the piano stool. A red-horn gramophone on a side table completes the scene, with records and loose pages at their feet. Husson renders the group in a loose, warm cartoon style: rounded faces, bright flat colour, a cheerful sense of noise.
Léon Husson designed this lithograph for Maison Poussier, a music retailer with shops at 6 Rue Aubert in Épinal and 90 Grande Rue in Remiremont in the Vosges. The lower panel of the poster names the brands Poussier carried: Gaveau, Pleyel, and Érard pianos; Aeolian player mechanisms; a lutherie workshop; and Pathé phonographs and discs. The printer, Imprimerie V. Idoux & Cie. of Nancy, appears in the imprint at the foot of the sheet. Husson was a self-taught Lorraine illustrator, born in 1898 in Circourt-sur-Mouzon, who worked from the early 1920s with Victor Idoux's commercial art house, producing posters and advertising material that documented the retail and leisure culture of eastern France between the wars.
The poster is a document of a particular moment in French provincial commercial life: the music shop as community anchor, stocking instruments for brass bands, parlour pianos for the bourgeois household, and the new Pathé disc technology in the same premises. The bold yellow headline, the black ground, and the energetic illustration are characteristic of the early 1920s regional lithograph tradition, less exported than the grand Paris railway poster but equally direct in its graphic ambition.
Reproduced as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A natural fit for a music room, study, or any space where the history of French commercial design has a place.
