The Dandy Squirrel: A Moody Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
He has stopped mid-scramble to consider you, and the consideration is clearly going in your favor. One enormous dark eye, bright as a polished bead, a nose lifted to test the air, whiskers fanned: this red squirrel has the alert, well dressed self possession of a small gentleman caught between appointments. We portrait the animals of our Italian Poster Style series the way the classic poster artists staged their jesters and dancers, alone in lamplight on a ground of velvet black, and few sitters wear the honor as jauntily as this one.
The series takes its language from Italy's great advertising posters of the early twentieth century, the world of Cappiello and the aperitivo hour, where a single figure against darkness could sell a nation its evening drink. The squirrel, who has never needed to sell anything in his life, turns out to be a natural: vivid, quick, and entirely convinced of his own importance, which is to say, poster perfect.
From the Collection
Vintage Squirrel Wall Art Print, 1920's Italian Poster Style
A red squirrel in close profile, one great dark eye, in russet and cream on the series' velvet dark ground.
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VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
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Dark Academia Fox Art: A Moody Vintage Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
The Posters Behind the Series
Leonetto Cappiello, the Livorno born artist who reinvented the advertising poster in Paris, understood that charm is a kind of speed. His figures leap, grin, and gesture, torn out of any setting and pasted against flat darkness so the eye has nowhere else to go, a method we follow in our post on Cappiello's orange jester. The poster had about two seconds of a pedestrian's attention, and Cappiello spent those seconds on personality.
Our animal portraits borrow the staging and slow it down. The squirrel keeps the dark ground and the theatrical light, but where the poster jester performs, the squirrel simply attends, and attention, held at this scale, becomes its own performance. The whiskers alone, drawn one by one like the strings of an instrument, repay the two seconds many times over.
Reading the Portrait
The eye is the whole picture's engine. Enlarged to monumental scale, glossy black with a single window of light reflected in it, it gives the portrait its spark of intelligence, the sense that the squirrel is not posing but assessing, and that the assessment involves whether you might be carrying something edible. Around it, the fur is built in fine engraved strokes, grey cream on the cheek, warming through the neck into the famous red of the back and shoulder, the russet of an Italian autumn.
Notice the ear, tipped and tufted, and the long fur of the chest, combed downward like a waistcoat. The portrait treats the squirrel's small scale as a rumor. At poster size, in this light, he has the presence of a much larger animal, a fox's smaller and more cheerful cousin, entirely at ease in the spotlight he plainly believes he was born for.
The Squirrel in Italy
Italy's native red squirrel is the squirrel of the stone pine woods and the great city parks, the animal rustling in the umbrella pines of the Villa Borghese while Rome takes its evening walk below. It is a creature of the canopy and the pine nut, the living punctuation of the Italian landscape's most painted tree. Where the grey squirrel has invaded from abroad, the red remains the beloved original, russet as a roof tile and twice as quick.
He is also an ancient emblem of foresight, the animal who banks against winter, and Italian grandmothers have praised the habit for centuries. The portrait catches the virtue mid-motion: head up, stores forgotten for one moment, because something interesting, possibly you, has entered the clearing.
Velvet and the Engraved Line
Squirrel fur is a gift to the engraved line, short and bright on the face, long and silky on the chest, and the portrait spends its hatching accordingly, thousands of fine strokes running with the coat's direction so the surface seems to ripple as the light moves. The dark ground, scratched and weathered like a wall that has carried a hundred posters, throws the russet forward until it glows.
That glow is the series' signature: color as lamplight on velvet. The chromolithographers of the old Ricordi firm built their warmth from separate stones of ink; this portrait builds it from line on darkness, and prints with the same amber depth at full size.
One of a Menagerie
The squirrel keeps company with the dogs, cats, birds, and bolder creatures of the series, all staged on the same dark ground, a menagerie introduced in Italian-Inspired Animal Prints: Quiet Drama with a Graphic Edge. He is its quickest member and its best dressed. The full company, this print included, lives in our 1920's Italian Poster Style collection.
