Ayer's Cherry Pectoral - Edward Penfield

Penfield's poster for Ayer's Cherry Pectoral, a popular cough remedy sold throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The poster applies his characteristic graphic style to a patent medicine advertisement, giving a mass-market pharmaceutical product the visual treatment normally reserved for literary magazines and luxury goods.

Historical context

Ayer's Cherry Pectoral was manufactured by J.C. Ayer & Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, from the 1840s onwards. It was one of the most widely advertised patent medicines in America, promoted through newspaper advertisements, almanacs, and trade cards. Like many patent medicines of the era, its ingredients (including alcohol and, in early formulations, opiates) would later be regulated by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

The fact that a leading poster artist was commissioned to advertise a cough remedy shows how mainstream poster advertising had become by the 1890s. The same illustrators who worked for literary magazines also accepted commissions from pharmaceutical manufacturers, bicycle companies, and explosives firms. For Penfield, a commercial commission was a commercial commission; the product mattered less than the design opportunity. His Ayer's poster brings the same visual discipline to a medicine bottle that he brought to Harper's Magazine.

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.