To the roots of the wondrous

This postcard was published in 2001 to publicise an exhibition of the work of Aristide Caillaud who died in 1990 at the age of 88. He started to draw as a prisoner of war in a camp near Dresden in the early 1940s.

The painting here: “Aux raciness du merveilleux” which I translate as, “To the roots of the wondrous” is typical of his work. If you search for his name using Google images you’ll find a wealth of incredibly colourful images.

A real gem!

We went to a auction in Bordeaux last Friday. It was a really good day. We managed to get some good lots and amongst the postcards was this one. There were two postcards made of the artist, Alfred Renaudin, at work on the banks of the river Moselle in the Lorraine region of France.

This is the rarer of the two. Alfred Renaudin (1866 – 1944) was a French landscape painter who was most active between the wars although this postcard was sent in 1905.

I looked on the internet to see if I could find the final painting, nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it’s in a private collection.

The happy father

Even in the dark times of war there is a glimpse of hope and light. A happy soldier on leave holds his baby. The drawing on the postcard was made in 1917 by Luchard. I haven’t been able to find anything out about the artist.

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.

First Steps

This is sculpture from the 1911 Paris Art Exhibition. It’s called “The First Steps” and is by Gertrude Bricard. I could only find out that she was born in 1881 and died in 1963. If you look in Google images you will see more of her work.

It’s such a graceful sculpture it caught my eye straight away.

I discovered that 1911 at the exhibition was the year of the rise of Cubism, Apollinaire took Picasso to see the cubist works there! Critics thought that too much space had been given to the Cubists who were utterly without importance.

Somewhere in an exhibition room amongst all of the controversy was this lovely peaceful sculpture

Artist's inspiration

Here is a postcard illustrated by the artist Frédéric Régamey. It is an advertisement for Vin Mariani which was Bordeaux wine treated with coca leaves. Here you see examples of before, during and after.  The wine extracted the cocaine from the leaves which very much altered the drink’s effect (Queen Victoria drank it too!!). The wine was exported to the US where it was eventually replaced by Coca-Cola during the prohibition. While researching Vin Mariani and Frédéric Régamy I was interested to discover that he made the drawings from his own autoportrait – useful information for me as his brother was also F Régamy (Félix) and drew in a very similar style…

The postcard is in very poor condition and is over 110 years old. Thank you to Wikipedia for the drawing and information

Sphinx

This is a postcard of one of several sphinx that guard the Château de Bagatelle in Paris. The model for the face of the sphinx was an opera singer Rose Duthé. This particular sphinx is situated at the back of the Château