Colouful costume

 

Here is a lovely illustration of a Slovakian costume.  We had several beautiful postcards by this illustrater.  This is the last one left.  Our future daughter-in-law is Czech and one of her grandmothers is Slovak, so I'm hoping to give it to her as a present.

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.

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

The Appy God Son

After a very interesting auction in Limoges last week, it’s time to start looking at what we bought:

The first American troops arrived in France in June 1917. They were very much appreciated as this postcard illustrated by Xavier sager (1881-1969) shows. “The New Godson” has been well and truly adopted.

Happy days

These postcards were sold in 1939, just before the war. They were sold for 1 franc each in aid of the National Committee for Summer Camps in France. From what I can find out there were guest illustrators every year who produced a set of cards. These were painted by Georges Redon. He seems to have illustrated quite a few postcards and various posters etc., but there doesn’t seem to be anything written about his life.

Flight of fancy

A different type of card today. This postcard was based on a poster for Air France around 1948, just when the world was opening up again after the Second World War. I love the colours, I wonder how many people were inspired to travel by it?