No more mills

In 1895 two brothers-in-law working as "the Beggarstaffs" — William Nicholson and James Pryde — cut a Don Quixote out of paper: black and brown shapes, a knight on a white horse, a lance, a windmill behind.¹ It was a design for a poster, and Henry Irving, who had asked for it, turned it down. By the museum's account he objected to the windmill — "No more mills!"²

The play went on

The usual telling makes this a poster for a Don Quixote that never happened. It is the other way round. A Chapter from Don Quixote opened at the Lyceum on 4 May 1895 with Irving in it, ran the season, and toured the United States.³ It was the poster that never happened. Irving killed the image; the production is forgotten; the rejected design is the thing that survived.⁴

Legible from a moving bus

The Beggarstaffs worked against everything Victorian advertising loved — no ornament, no Art Nouveau vine, just flat colour and hard silhouette, figures left half-finished because the eye completes them.⁵ The test was whether a poster held together "even when merely glimpsed from a moving horse-bus."⁶ They were too far ahead of their clients: the partnership lost money and broke up by 1899, and both men went back to painting.⁷ But that reduction to silhouette helped set the course of the modern poster.⁸

The design, not the print

This is not a printed poster off a wall. It is the original — cut and pasted paper, nearly two metres square, that lay in Nicholson's studio for thirty years before the V&A bought it.⁹ The thing itself, made by hand, that the street never got to see.

A knight who tilted at a windmill, on a poster killed over a windmill. Black and brown on white, cut from paper — nothing redrawn. You wear the design Irving turned down.