Stone and Bottle

Chromolithography made the drinks poster possible, and it made it disposable. Each color was drawn by hand, in reverse, onto its own stone — a Cappiello devil might take a dozen stones, one per ink, laid down in exact registration so the black ground and the green figure met at a hair’s width. Pasted to a wall, rained on, painted over by next season’s bill — a poster was never meant to outlive the season it advertised. Look closely at any sheet in this house, in Stone detail on every piece page, and the grain of the stone is still there in the ink.

The golden age, and the bans that ended it

Between roughly 1880 and 1914, drinks advertising and poster art rose together — Mucha, Cappiello, Privat-Livemont, Chéret built entire careers selling absinthe, champagne, and aperitifs on the same walls Montmartre hung its theatre bills. Then the ground moved under the category itself. Switzerland banned absinthe in 1910, France in 1915, the United States in 1912; the U.S. added Prohibition in 1920. The posters did not stop being beautiful. The businesses that commissioned them simply, in most cases, stopped existing. What survives, survives as art history with nowhere left to advertise for.

Restore honestly, disclose always

What survives, survives damaged: fold lines, foxing, losses where the paper simply gave out. We restore digitally and conservation-grade only — mend the fold, lift the stain, fill the loss so the eye reads the image the artist drew. We never “improve” a design, never invent what time removed. Every restored piece says so, on its own page, in its conservation note.

Cleared by the piece’s own year

We gate every piece by the piece’s own publication year, never a brand’s founding year or the year the mark went dark. Pieces published in 1930 or earlier are public domain in the United States under the 95-year rule; temperance and enforcement-era government material clears as a work of the U.S. government, public domain from the moment it was made. Nothing hangs here without a verdict of CLEAR — and nothing hangs without its mark status stated: dead, live, or live and flagged. See The Lost for the roll call of what the bans took.

Printed museum-grade, to last

From a faithful source scan we print with archival pigment inks on museum-grade cotton-rag stock, color-managed to the scan. What was printed to be painted over within a season, we make to last another century — on the wall of a home bar or a den, not in a rafter.