Modern art edited by J. M. Bowles (1895) - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
Dow builds the whole sheet from notan - flat masses of dark against light with no line work - so the poster demonstrates the compositional doctrine the magazine exists to teach instead of describing it. Letting the poppy stems cross the panel edge collapses frame and image into one surface, a Japanese print device that makes a small sheet feel spatially larger than its rectangle. Restricting the run to three flat colours on tinted stock means the paper itself carries a fourth value, which is both a cost decision and the reason the sheet looks calm next to chromolithographed competitors. The hand-brushed title matches the brush-massed landscape, so type and image read as made by one hand.
Steal this when
Use this when the thing you are selling is a point of view or a method, and the promotional piece can be built by that same method. Let the craft of the artefact be the argument, hold to two or three flat colours, and let the tinted stock do a colour's worth of work.