Ethel Reed

Ethel Reed – American Art Nouveau Poster Prints

Ethel Reed was one of the most remarkable figures of the 1890s poster craze — a self-taught artist from Massachusetts who rose to national fame by the age of twenty-one. Working in Boston's vibrant fin-de-siècle art scene, she produced poster work that defined what American Art Nouveau looked like: bold flat colours, sinuous botanical borders, and female subjects rendered with an enigmatic psychological depth rarely seen in commercial graphic art of the period.

Her career was brief — she disappeared from public life in her mid-twenties — which makes her output all the more striking. In just a few years she produced work that placed her alongside Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec as a defining voice of the movement. The posters she made for Boston publishers have a sophistication that still holds up: graphic without being blunt, decorative without being superficial.

Sizes and Framing

Reed's poster art prints beautifully on fine art paper. The flat colour fields and precise linework of Art Nouveau graphics are ideally suited to the smooth 225g matte surface, which renders each edge and colour transition with accuracy. Paper prints are available in A3, 50×70 cm, 70×100 cm, and A0. Oak frames complement the warm, fin-de-siècle palette; black frames give the work a more contemporary gallery edge.

Canvas is a less obvious choice for graphic poster work — the texture of the cotton weave softens the crisp linework slightly. That said, larger canvas sizes (70×100 cm) can work well for pieces where the botanical borders and colour fields benefit from physical presence. Canvas prints are available in 30×40 cm, 50×70 cm, and 70×100 cm.

Related Collections

For other Art Nouveau and fin-de-siècle graphic art, explore the Art Nouveau collection or browse vintage poster prints. For contemporary artists working with similar bold, graphic poster aesthetics, see Dikhotomy. All prints produced in our Berlin studio using archival pigment inks rated for 100+ years.