Paris, Belle Époque opera poster – Georges Rochegrosse, 1900

LOUISE – LOVE ABOVE PARIS, 1900

“Théâtre National de l’Opéra Comique. Louise”, poster designed by Georges Rochegrosse for Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise. Colour lithograph, here issued in reduced format by Imprimerie Chaix in Paris in 1900 as part of the celebrated series Les Maîtres de l’Affiche. With the embossed stamp Les Maîtres de l’Affiche – Imprimerie Chaix at lower right and signed “G. Rochegrosse” at lower left within the image. Size : image 22.5 × 30.8 cm; sheet approx. 40 × 29 cm.

High above the lights of Paris, Louise embraces her lover Julien. The city stretches behind them towards the horizon, while the couple seems almost detached from the world below. Georges Rochegrosse chose one of the most romantic moments in the opera: the third act, in which Louise and Julien are living together in a small house on the slopes of Montmartre, looking out over Paris as evening falls.

Louise, for which Charpentier wrote both the music and the libretto, premiered at the Paris Opéra-Comique on 2 February 1900. Its heroine is a young seamstress from a working-class family who falls in love with Julien, a bohemian poet. Against her parents’ wishes, she chooses her lover and the free artistic life of Montmartre. The everyday world of workers, seamstresses, street vendors and artists was given an unusually prominent place on the operatic stage. Charpentier therefore described his work not simply as an opera, but as a “roman musical en 4 actes et 5 tableaux” – a musical novel in four acts and five tableaux.

Paris is almost a character in its own right in Louise. The city represents freedom, love and temptation, in contrast to the restrictive parental home from which Louise is trying to escape. Rochegrosse powerfully encapsulated that idea in this poster: the lovers dominate the foreground while the vast city of Paris sparkles below them. The image is therefore both a love scene and an evocation of fin-de-siècle Montmartre, with its associations of bohemian life, artistic freedom and liberation from bourgeois convention.

Rochegrosse designed the poster in 1900, the year of the opera’s premiere. The original large-format version was printed in Paris by Imprimerie Delanchy & Cie and measured approximately 84 × 63 cm. That same year, Jules Chéret selected the design for Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, the prestigious series in which celebrated contemporary posters were reissued by Imprimerie Chaix in a more manageable format for collectors. This Louise appeared in one of the final issues of the series.

Les Maîtres de l’Affiche was published from December 1895 to November 1900 and comprised 240 numbered poster plates, in addition to sixteen special plates. The lithographs were printed specifically for collectors and are therefore original works of Belle Époque graphic art in their own right, rather than later reproductions.

Price: Euro 175,-