Leonetto Cappiello

Leonetto Cappiello was an Italian and French poster artist and painter who lived and worked primarily in Paris. He is now known as the "Father of Modern Advertising" due to his poster design innovations. Early poster artists Jules Chéret, Alfred Choubrac, and Hugo D'Alesi exemplified the painterly quality of the advertising poster. Cappiello, like other young artists, worked in an almost antithetical manner to his predecessors. He was the first poster artist to use bold figures popping out of black backgrounds, which was a startling departure from the posters' early norm.