The black cat of Montmartre

In 1881 Rodolphe Salis opened a cabaret at 84 boulevard de Rochechouart, at the foot of Montmartre, and called it Le Chat Noir, the Black Cat. In 1885 it moved to the rue Laval. Singers, poets and painters came to perform and to drink; Erik Satie, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Guy de Maupassant were among them.

Its best-known attraction was a shadow theatre. The artist Henri Rivière cut the figures out of zinc and painted the scenery on glass, and whole plays were told in silhouette.

In 1896 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen drew this poster to announce a coming tour of the Chat Noir with Salis: "Prochainement", coming soon. Steinlen was Swiss, born in Lausanne, and had come to Paris in 1881. The poster is a colour lithograph about 1.4 metres tall, printed by Charles Verneau in Paris, and almost all of it is the cat: upright, yellow-eyed, crowned with a red halo, sitting on the band that carries Salis's name.

Salis died in 1897, and the cabaret closed soon after. The cat outlived it. The Bibliothèque nationale de France calls Steinlen's poster the most famous image of the cabaret's cat, now seen everywhere along the Seine and in souvenir shops. The V&A notes that while both artists were alive, Steinlen was more famous than Toulouse-Lautrec.