About Paris - Edward Penfield

Penfield's poster for About Paris by Richard Harding Davis, a collection of essays about the French capital published by Harper & Brothers. The image evokes Parisian life, consistent with Davis's chatty, observational style of travel writing.

Historical context

Paris was the cultural capital that American writers, artists, and tourists aspired to experience in the 1890s. The city's cafés, galleries, theatres, and boulevards represented everything that American cities were not yet: old, layered, cosmopolitan, and deeply invested in art and food. Richard Harding Davis's essays offered an American perspective on Parisian life, written for readers who might never cross the Atlantic but wanted to know what they were missing.

The book was published at a time when transatlantic travel was becoming more accessible to the upper-middle class, and guidebook-style writing was a reliable commercial genre. Penfield's poster promotes the book within the Harper's catalogue, using his standard approach of a single figure in a suggestive setting. The Parisian theme gave him an opportunity to channel the French affiche tradition more directly than usual, since the subject matter itself was French.

About Edward Penfield (1866–1925)

Often called the father of the American poster, Penfield served as art director of Harper's Magazine from 1890 to 1901, producing over 100 cover designs during that period. His style drew on Japanese woodblock printing and the French affiche tradition: flat areas of colour, bold outlines, and minimal detail. He became one of the most recognised illustrators of the American Art Nouveau movement, and his wartime posters remain some of the most widely studied examples of early 20th-century graphic propaganda.

This fine art reproduction is printed on museum-grade stock, faithful to the original's bold colours and graphic simplicity.