Newport x A Eunuch's Dream

Newport.

Since 1972, Newport released ads that would often feature young, happy people in an active scenario. These images were accompanied with two core slogans.

The “Alive with Pleasure” slogan implies Newports are a pleasurable addition to your active life, and “Newport Pleasure” portrays them as fun, enjoyable, and subconsciously sexy.

By depicting these scenarios with reassuring slogans, viewers relate life and healthy living with Newports. I liked the concept of Newports selling pleasure, packaged up and sold as a tangible product.

The Painting.

A Eunuch's Dream (1874) by Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ depicts a dreaming eunuch (who’d a thought) of a harem slave. His dream is materialised through an opium pipe he fell asleep smoking.

Rather than having a cool, heroin-fueled dream, it’s disrupted by a baby holding a knife dripping in blood. This signifies his unfortunate anatomy (google what a eunuch is), and how it prevents him from fulfilling his dream - being with this woman.

This painting caught my attention because of the spirit/dream emitted through his pipe - as if it's responsible for its manifestation, not his dream. I like that.

The Poster.

To use the painting how I envisioned it, it needed to be chopped up - I pulled the sky and spirits across to fit in a 4:5 frame. Of course, the pipe was replaced with a Newport, and the spirit was aligned to be emitting from its end.

Eager to maintain consistent colours, I changed the eunuchs garments and surrounding carpet to feature more gold and dark cyan, resembling the iconic Newport packaging.

Alive with pleasure takes a literal sense when contextualised with this painting. It implies that Newports are filled with life, the personification of pleasure - like a genie in a bottle, except it only grants menthols.

In this case, pleasure is a woman, smoking a Newport, accompanied by a spirit-child holding, you guessed it, a giant Newport.