The JOB collection is a production of graphic works consisting of calendars, posters and postcards advertising the JOB rolling paper factory. Artistic in character, it was illustrated by renowned painters and poster artists, mainly during the Art Nouveau period.
The owners of the JOB brand, grandchildren and allies of founder Jean Bardou, were industrialists and patrons of the arts. From 1895 until the Great War they enlisted the help of numerous artists, often their close friends, to advertise cigarette paper. Painters and illustrators representing the main artistic currents of the time, from academic painter Paul Jean Gervais to Catalan Modernist Ramon Casas, from orientalist Georges Rochegrosse to Montmartre humorist Charles Léandre, as well as Jane Atché, all contributed. This collection of 32 works became known to the general public through calendar and poster prints, and was widely distributed as postcards in France and abroad. Alphonse Mucha's two most famous productions, La femme blonde and La femme brune, were a huge success and are still highly sought-after by collectors today.
Alongside this well-referenced production, other works do not benefit from the widespread distribution offered by the postcard, either because they remained at the sketch stage, such as the soldiers imagined by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or because they were only the subject of rare posters, such as the Spanish ones by Gaspar Camps. Recent biographies of the artists and the poster collections held in museums allow us to attempt to reconstruct the completeness of the collection up to the 1920s, when creation became very sporadic. Later, artists influenced by JOB and Art Nouveau revived certain posters. In the 1960s, a JOB poster by Mucha was reinterpreted with a psychedelic effect, and in 2008, Stuck artist Paul Harvey proposed a new version of the brand's advertising posters.
The JOB collection is a significant example of the "marriage of Art and Industry", one of the foundations of Art Nouveau, in the field of graphic arts.