About the Artist
Jacquot and Coco take centre stage in this Charles Lévy poster for the Ambassadeurs, turning an entertainment advertisement into an introduction to Belle Époque Paris. Lévy is associated with lithographic printing for popular performance, a connection that places this sheet at the meeting point of theatre and commercial art. The advertised destination was the Champs-Élysées, where the Ambassadeurs offered an evening of café-concert entertainment. For anyone exploring Charles Lévy wall art, this 1888 advertisement provides a concrete starting point: a named attraction promoted for a particular Parisian venue, rather than an imagined scene of tropical wildlife.
The Artwork
An evening at the Ambassadeurs promised a departure from ordinary boulevard life. Jacquot and Coco were the named attraction in this 1888 advertising poster, which promoted performing monkeys to audiences on the Champs-Élysées. As a café-concert, the venue combined refreshments with live entertainment, making the act part of a social outing rather than a visit to a formal theatre. The vintage poster preserves that commercial invitation and the place of animal performance in nineteenth-century popular entertainment. Viewed today as a vintage print, it records what the venue offered its customers, not monkeys observed in their natural habitat.
Style & Characteristics
A vermilion ground opens between bamboo stems as three smaller monkeys climb and stretch above two larger seated animals. Brown fur is streaked by darker marks, while pale faces emerge from the surrounding foliage. Below, long pointed leaves fan out around the seated pair. Cream Ambassadeurs lettering spans a black band at the top; red Jacquot & Coco lettering anchors the foot against a pale ground. The eye follows the animals from the bamboo down into the dense greenery. In this vertical poster, the tropical setting nearly encloses the lower figures while leaving open red space around the climbers.
In Interior Design
Imagine this vintage animal art print above a walnut sideboard in a Parisian apartment dining corner. A shaded pendant lights the table nearby, leaving the red background to warm the pale plaster wall. Choose a narrow black frame to echo the band behind the Ambassadeurs lettering, and leave enough bare wall for the climbing figures to remain legible from a chair. Here, home decor takes its cue from café-concert entertainment: the monkeys become companions to an evening meal. As a fine art print used in interior decoration, the sheet brings a specific fragment of Parisian nightlife into the room.
