Postcards
I love pictures and what better way to obtain loads of them than to collect postcards. Of course, when I’ve grown up I’ll be able to afford a huge house with loads of wall space and therefore loads of picture space. Until then I’ll collect (and deal in) postcards.
The first for your delectation and delight is ‘The Piper of Dreams’ - maybe it’s an image you are familiar with. It was painted in watercolour and ‘heightened’ with gouache - by Estelle Canziani (1887-1964). I was delighted to find this postcard - one of these, framed, hung on my bedroom wall all through my childhood. It still hangs there.
This picture was the most celebrated fairy picture of the Edwardian era - apparently over a quarter of a million prints were sold in the year it first appeared - that is, in 1915 - and many of those prints accompanied soldiers to the trenches - some ephemeral escapism from the hell of WWI. What magic some pictures have embedded within their lines…
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A postcard - original probably watercolour and gouache - by William Dudley Ward - born in Graveley Bank, England, 19 April 1879 - died in Montreal, Quebec, 1935. Haven’t found out much about this guy as yet. But what a fantastic picture - so full of character - and look at those shadows - you can do so much with shadows in a painting. What was the chap with the pipe thinking? Maybe he wanted to go home.
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This is a fabulous artist - every line in one of her pictures flows into the whole effect as though it couldn’t possibly be drawn another way. This is ‘Little Faithful’ (a “Tailwagger” postcard) by ‘Mac’ which was a pseudonym for Lucy Dawson.
Her most prolific decade was the 1930s - she worked on several books on dogs which are now collectors’ items, of course. She lived in Bristol for a while and then London and then Hertfordshire where she died not quite eighty years of age. She was commissioned by the Royal Family to paint their favourite corgi - Dookie - at Windsor Castle. This became their personal Christmas card.
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The next card is by Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) - ‘Among the Poppies’. JWS was one of the USA’s best loved artists, her work appearing regularly on the front cover of Good Housekeeping to name just one of the many publications her images graced. She illustrated ‘The Water Babies’ amongst other books. She never married or had children but her main love was to paint ideal images of children in environments where you know they will never experience any rain in their lives - maybe she painted the ideal childhood, rather than the ideal child.
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Sybil Barham (1877-1950) - ‘The Shadow Dance’. What an amazing picture! Simple, but the movement and sea-noise in it is tangible. I can’t find anything on SB at the moment. I shall update this when I do.
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And this card is here just because it’s a dog wave!
