The composition pairs the female figure with the champagne bottle, one of the most effective devices of postwar advertising: elegance, allure and the promise of celebration are combined in an immediately legible image, designed to catch the eye even before revealing the brand name.
Jean Jacquelin was one of the great French advertising illustrators of the twentieth century. Trained at the École Germain-Pilon, he joined Éditions STEP in 1927 and became its artistic director in the early 1930s. After the agency closed, he pursued a prolific independent career, working for the automobile, tourism, press, publishing and fashion industries as well as major consumer brands.
His campaigns included work for Peugeot, Delage, Simca, Fiat, Hotchkiss, Shell, Esso, Air France, the Compagnie générale transatlantique, Vittel, Le Printemps and Champagnes Mercier. From the 1940s onward, he also established himself in film poster design, while illustrating numerous book covers and dust jackets, notably for Presses de la Cité and the novels of Georges Simenon.
This original design allows us to see the earliest stage of the advertising creation, before the constraints of printing, typographic captions and mass distribution. It was used in the printed press between 1955 and 1956.
Mercier’s choice of Jean Jacquelin follows the house’s long-standing tradition of advertising. Founded in Épernay in 1858 by Eugène Mercier, the house understood early on the power of image and spectacle. The gigantic vat transported to Paris for the 1889 Universal Exposition was its first great coup: the largest cask in the world, built from 150 oak trees with a capacity of 1,600 hectolitres.
Jacquelin’s design thus extends, in the graphic language of his time, Mercier’s long-standing ambition: to present champagne not as a product reserved for a few connoisseurs, but as the desirable companion of happy moments.
Jean Jacquelin’s work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Bibliothèque Forney in 1993, accompanied by the catalogue Jean Jacquelin, affichiste et dessinateur publicitaire, by Anne-Claude Lelieur and Raymond Bachollet.
A unique piece, in fine condition.