Christmas is coming

A Christmas card sent over 100 years ago with a seaside theme. From a mother to her son.

Gateways

My father sometimes used to make wrought iron work, so I’ve always appreciated the hard work that goes into it. How many hours, I wonder, went into creating these two masterpieces?

The gateway at the prefecture in Tours can be seen today. It originally came from the Abbey at Beaumont-lès-Tours and was classed as a historical Monument in 1917. 

 This gateway at the Château des Perrais is still there too, although the Chateau is now a private Catholic school.

Lady in a green dress

I sent this postcard as a birthday card to someone. I love the way that the dress sweeps round. I wonder what colour it was in real life.

The Flower Market, Nice

As well as being a popular destination for the jet set (even Queen Victoria enjoyed Nice), Nice was famous for its flower market.

This card comes from the collection of an Artist; Antoine-François Cosyns. It seems that his friends sent him the most interesting postcards they could find on their travels., including this one.

Another postcard of the market

Embroiderer of headdresses

I think that this is a peaceful postcard. She’s working quietly away at a headdress. Notice the lace on her sleeves and her own bonnet.

Can you hear the birds singing?

A postcard of a farm in Normandie. It looks an enchanted place. The card was sent to a Belgian artist, AF Cosyns, who worked in France from 1911 to 1950.

He received many interesting postcards from friends on their travels.

An American Sewing Machine

Every young girl's dream...

The New Home sewing machine was from America, but these postcards are both French. Here is the history of the company with lovely old illustrations, I imagine that some of them were postcards too..

Лили Дамита

Lili Damita 

At first I assumed that this was a postcard of a Russian Actress. I sent a scan off to J-M, my son-in-law, for a translation. Not at all a Russian actress, she was born in France in 1904!

After winning a beauty contest and appearing in several European films, she was invited to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn in 1928. She married an unknown actor who later became very well known, Errol Flyn. They divorced in 1942.

Lili died in 1994 before her 90th birthday of Alzheimer’s disease.

An interesting pair of shoes…

…With wishes for the new year by Achille Mauzan. He was a French artist who moved to Italy. Member of the Art Deco movement, he designed over 2000 posters.

Unfortunately these cards have a lot of foxing(rust marks) on the back as well as a child’s scribbling.

Sweet peas

Catharina Klein was born in Prussia in 1861.  She specialized in painting flowers and fruit and many of her works were used as postcard illustrations.  Before the war of 1914 many postcards were produced in Germany.  Later she was sometimes known as Catherine and worked in Berlin until her death in 1929.  During World War II many of her original paintings were destroyed by bombing by the allies. 

Her postcards are quite common, but I’ve not been able to find another postcard online like this one, posted in 1903, of sweet peas.

By coincidence

I came across this postcard today depicting a terrible storm back in 1904 in a town in the North of France. As a result of a storm, high winds and a deluge of rain, the little river that went through the town turned into a raging torrent. Houses that overhung the river were destroyed as their foundations were washed away. There was plenty of flooding and damage throughout the rest of the town too. 21 people died that day. A reminder perhaps, that we have always been at the mercy of nature.
(Whether the government be right or left!)

A quiet road

I think that I would like to spend a warm afternoon in spring taking a stroll down this road.

I looked on Google Earth.  There are still plenty of trees and also plenty of houses.  It’s a busy main road nowadays, so not much chance of a peaceful walk.  Did I find the same houses with steps leading up to them?  I can’t be sure…

Children playing in the park

Just over 100 years ago these children were enjoying themselves in a park in Paris.

These are exactly the kind of postcards that I would collect if I could afford them.  There again, if I didn't sell postcards like these I would never have had the chance to see them, let alone share them on this blog!