Style Guide · 6 min read · Kuriosis Studio Team, Berlin · July 2026
The bicycle and the modern poster grew up together. In the 1890s a new machine put ordinary people on wheels for the first time, and a new printing craft put bold, colourful advertising on every street corner. Cycling art comes straight out of that collision — part freedom, part design history. It is also a genuine gap on most walls: everyone has a coast print or a city map, far fewer have a great bicycle poster. This short guide covers where the imagery comes from and how to hang it.
The 1890s cycling craze
The arrival of the "safety bicycle" — two equal wheels, a chain drive, pneumatic tyres — turned cycling from a daredevil stunt into something anyone could do. It became a genuine craze across Europe and America, and manufacturers needed to sell into it. They turned to the poster, which had just become a mass medium thanks to colour lithography. According to poster historians, pioneers like Jules Chéret opened the door to full-colour advertising art, and among his clients were cycle makers — the bicycle industry was one of the loudest advertisers of the Belle Époque.
The bicycle also carried a bigger meaning. The National Women's History Museum records Susan B. Anthony's famous line from 1896: cycling, she said, "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." Women adopted practical "rational dress" to ride, and the bicycle became the emblem of the independent "New Woman." That is a lot of meaning for one machine — and it is why cycling imagery still reads as optimistic and free rather than merely nostalgic.
Two masters of the cycling poster
No cycling poster is more famous than Alphonse Mucha's Cycles Perfecta. According to the Mucha Foundation, it was made in 1902 for a British bicycle company, printed as a colour lithograph in Paris. A woman leans over the handlebars, her golden hair streaming through the whole composition — the Foundation describes Mucha expressing "the freedom and exhilaration associated with riding a bicycle," the flowing hair lending "a sense of motion." It is Art Nouveau at full stretch, and it is the single most recognisable cycling image ever made.
Across the Atlantic, Edward Penfield (1866–1925) was doing something flatter and more modern. Often called the father of the American poster, Penfield was art director at Harper's, where — as the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes — he made a poster for each successive issue for over seven years, in a style that "synthesized Japanese ukiyo-e prints" with contemporary European design. His cycling imagery, like our Man Riding Bicycle, strips the scene to calm, flat colour and a confident outline. His own rule sums up the whole poster movement: "A design that needs study is not a poster."
Man Riding Bicycle — Penfield
Bicyclettes — Bodart
Let's Go for a Bike Ride — Graef
Old craze, new voices
Cycling never left the artist's repertoire, and two contemporary pieces in our collection carry the tradition forward in very different registers. Bicyclettes by the French graphic artist Florent Bodart is a clean, diagram-style chart of historic bicycle models — quiet, technical and well suited to a hallway or a study, especially for anyone who actually rides. At the opposite end, Sue Graef's Let's Go for a Bike Ride is a bold, high-colour painting of a bike against a hot red ground — a modern statement piece that brings energy to a plain wall.
A symbol of freedom
Cycling imagery reads as movement and independence — warmer and more optimistic than most retro decor.
Design pedigree
Mucha and Penfield are studied as founders of the modern poster — real art history, not just a bicycle.
A genuine gap
Far fewer homes hang a great bicycle poster than a coastline or a map — it stands out for that reason.
A personal gift
For anyone who rides, cycling art is one of the few decor pieces that is genuinely about them.
Browse Poster & Illustration Prints at Kuriosis →
How to hang cycling art
The two historic posters are portrait and vertical, which makes them natural on a narrow wall or flanking a doorway. The Belle Époque palette — warm reds, ochres, creams — sits well against a soft, off-white wall and with warm wood, so an oak frame tends to suit them better than a stark one. The Bodart bicycle chart is the quiet counterweight: it works beautifully in a set, one graphic diagram next to one colourful poster, so the wall has both calm and energy. If you want a single statement instead, the Graef painting carries a room on its own — hang it low enough to sit at eye level and let the red do the work.
Why Fine Art Prints? The Kuriosis Approach
We produce every print in our own Berlin studio with archival pigment inks, so the warm reds and ochres these designs depend on stay saturated for the long run. Browse the range and find the ride that fits your wall.
