This poster, advertising 'pure, sterilised milk from Vingeanne' presents the viewer with a wholesome image of a young girl (the artist's daughter), perched on a chair, drinking from a bowl of milk with both hands.Three cats crowd around her feet, their mouths open as if miaowing plaintively. Since his childhood, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen had shown an aptitude for depicting cats, frequently making them the focal point of his works. A caricature of Steinlen published in 1898, shows a wave of animals threatening to completely engulf the artist, with a giant cat at his left shoulder.

Steinlen was born in Lausanne in 1859 and, after arriving in Paris in 1881, soon became a member of the artistic community in Montmartre of which Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Adolphe Willette were also members. Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec depicted several of the same subjects in their work but it was the Swiss artist who enjoyed greater fame during the artists' lifetimes, no doubt due to his ability to undertake more commercial work, such as this poster for Vingeanne milk, which reached a greater audience than Toulouse-Lautrec's controversial graphic work.