Champagne Ruinart

This publicity poster for Ruinart champagne was one of the first that Mucha produced for Champenois Lithography. It dates from 1896, the same year as the Bernhardt series.

In the Champagne Ruinart poster, we see an elegantly gowned, distinguished, handsome-looking lady, maybe an opera singer, triumphantly holding aloft a bubbling glass of champagne.

She holds the glass as if it were a torch or a trophy rather than something to sip out of, ably communicating the superior quality of its contents.

The night they invented champagne was 1st September 1729, following an edict by King Louis XV authorising the transport of wine in bottles (rather than barrels), better suited for experimental bubbly wines.

The Ruinart brothers were wine-producers/cloth-makers and the first bottles of wine-with-bubbles were business gifts for clients of the cloth-making business.

It took only six years for the bubbles to overtake the cloth, and Maison Ruinart has been producing superior-grade champagne ever since.

Ruinart is known for its association with artists, a tradition that started when Alphonse Mucha delivered this delightful Champagne Ruinart poster and gave us Art Nouveau.

Art is not necessarily thought-provoking, challenging oil-on-canvas.

At times art comes in surprising packagings, even the commercial world of advertising has produced some handsome, captivating and often innovative art. This charming publicity poster depicting the delights of Champagne Ruinart is a splendid example.

Czech artist Alphonse Mucha produced numerous artistic posters for the Champenois Lithograph Printing company, and invented Art Nouveau. His decorative, distinctive, elegant style is unmistakable.

He is famous for the series of posters that he created for Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, posters that held the attention, captured the imagination and made the Divine Sarah appear even more divine.

His many posters all share delicate, floral motifs, while all his art (posters, paintings, drawings) has an elegant, ethereal charm.