The café, after hours · 1880–1930

LAST CALL

The bar closed. The art stayed open.

Museum-grade reproductions of public-domain drinks advertising, 1880–1930 — absinthe, beer, champagne, whiskey, aperitifs — weighted toward the brands the absinthe bans and Prohibition extinguished. Every mark in this room is a ghost. The art outlived the bottle.

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7 collections · independent — unaffiliated with and unendorsed by any beverage company

L'Heure Verte · 1896–1910s

The Green Hour

Absinthe — the hero collection. Every mark here is dead.

Privat-Livemont's Absinthe Robette leads: the most beautiful poster the green fairy ever got. Switzerland banned absinthe in 1910, France in 1915, the U.S. in 1912 — within twenty years the bans erased the category and every mark that sold it. What survives, survives only as art.

Enter The Green Hour(7)

Pre-Prohibition Americana · 1870s–1919

The Lost Breweries

Brewery lithographs and calendar art — thousands of brands, extinguished in one year.

Prohibition (1920) shuttered thousands of American breweries in a single stroke; most never reopened after Repeal. This collection is deep Americana, dead marks throughout.

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Rye & Bourbon, Pre-1920 · 1880s–1919

Whiskey Before the Drought

Pre-Prohibition American whiskey and rye lithography.

Dead American marks are weighted here; live Scotch houses are flagged or shelved rather than sold as if they were still pouring. The buyer's wall is the home bar and the den.

Enter Whiskey Before the Drought(6)

La Maison, in Poster · 1896–1899

The Champagne Wall

Mucha's Moët & Chandon and Ruinart — live marks, flagged throughout.

Alphonse Mucha's champagne panels for two houses that never stopped pouring. Sold strictly as art history — the poster, not the pour. Every piece here is flagged live-mark; nothing on this wall is marketing.

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Bitters · Vermouth · Quinquina · 1900s–1920s

The Aperitivo

Cappiello's Maurin Quina leads; Campari and Cinzano hang flagged live.

Leonetto Cappiello's green devil — the poster that made him, and arguably the birth of the mascot era in advertising: sell the symbol, not the scene.

Enter The Aperitivo(2)

Temperance & Enforcement · 1873–1933

The Dry Years

The counter-collection — the Green Hour's mirror image.

WCTU and Anti-Saloon League material, and enforcement-era government work (basis PD-USGov where applicable) — the case FOR the bans that built every other room in this house. Repeal iconography (1933) is on the watch list: it unlocks January 2029 under the same 95-year wall as everything else here, and cannot publish early.

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Empire & Export · 1892–1929

Trade Winds

The bar the empire built — beer, rum, sake, and colonial wine advertising from Tokyo to Brisbane to Algiers.

Where the Belle Époque wall stops at the Atlantic, the same commercial-art wave carried further on colonial and export trade: Japanese beer houses selling to a modernizing empire, Australian colonial breweries and distillers, French Algeria's settler wine trade. Most of these marks never stopped pouring — Kirin, Asahi, and Australia's XXXX and Tooheys are still on shelves today. Sold strictly as art history, flagged live throughout, the same rule as the Champagne Wall.

Enter Trade Winds(7)

On the wall

Made for the room that remembers the room

Hung in a bar, a study, a dining room — the register these were painted for. Illustrative renderings; the artwork itself is the honest reproduction.

Absinthe Robette, 1896, framed and hung on a styled wall

Absinthe Extra-Supérieure, 1900, framed and hung on a styled wall

Maurin Quina, 1906, framed and hung on a styled wall

Stone and Bottle

These were lithographs — drawn on stone, printed by the thousand, pasted to a wall, and painted over within the season. They were never meant to survive. We restore what did, honestly, and print it museum-grade to last another century. Not a poster reprint. A reproduction with a provenance.

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