Amazing Posters Designed by Hugo d’Alési in the Late 19th Century

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Romanian-born Hugo d’Alési (1849-1906) was one of the earliest artists to design posters for the French railway companies. They were printed using a process similar to chromolithography, called simile-aquarelle (“faux watercolor,”) that required up to 20 different colors to render the final image, making them much more richly printed, detailed and painterly than the travel posters from subsequent decades.

Posters designed by Hugo d’Alési in the 1880s and 1890s

By some accounts, he designed “hundreds for the railway companies”. It was such an expensive process that it drove the artist into bankruptcy shortly before his premature death. D’Alési’s posters caught the eye of many in France and around the world, including Paul Cézanne, who commented, “I should like to do decorative landscapes like Hugo d’Alési, yes, with my small sensibility”.

Here below is a set of amazing posters designed by Hugo d’Alési in the 1880s and 1890s.