Vintage Cigarette Advertisement Poster

Mixing Western and traditional pictorial styles, this vintage poster depicts a fashionable young woman strolling through a formal garden. The woman pauses to face the viewer, showing off the Western-style fur coat that cloaks her traditional garb. The ad’s perspective and realism conform to Western aesthetics, but the setting is distinctly Chinese, providing a glimpse of a traditional pavilion and framing the composition with bamboo and flowering plum branches. Curiously, the image is devoid of the product it touts, the cigarette packs and promotional text reserved as borders. Prized by collectors and preserved in museum collections, such posters provide a glimpse of the past when China’s growing economy intersected with Western culture.