This Week's Featured Items: Family Photos

This week's featured items in the Red Poulaine shop are four photographs or RPPCs of families; two show family picnics, one a family grouped around a dining table, and the last a "posed" photo of the entire family and their chimney sweeps. Yes, chimney sweeps! Marvelous, we thought, and so we had to share.

SOLD An Edwardian Picnic in the Park, Early 1900s

This photographic postcard was published by the "Ace of Clubs" group and the reverse of the card was printed in French. The grouping in this image reminds us of paintings by the Impressionists, while the presence of the small black child, apparently part of the family, unusual for the time, adds a bit of happy mystery to the image.



AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE A Picnic Lunch, Mid-1920s to Early 1930s

We place the date of this wonderful family picnic photo at somewhere between the mid-twenties to the early thirties. Was this a youngish grandmother with her adult children? We may never know, but we just love this image. High Summer, the meadow's yellowed grass, a stout wicker hamper, bread, wine, a lovely cheese perhaps... that baguette must have been wonderful. :) Don't you wish you could join them?



AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Coffee in the Parlor

We love an RPPC that takes us into a turn of the century home. It's like a trip in a time machine. On the reverse of the card is written in German (or something close to it), "The Jakobs family having coffee in the (something)room." The aging and wear of this image are apparent, but these relatively candid interior views come along rarely enough that we list them even when they are not in the finest condition.

AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE The Entire Family, Including the Chimney Sweeps, 1932 or Earlier

Awesome image of a large family gathering, including a pair of chimney sweeps who stand, like two royal coachmen in attendance, to either side of the family. The chimney sweeps remind us of Dick Van Dyke singing, "good luck will rub off when I shakes 'ands wiv you,"in the film Mary Poppins; perhaps this family so valued the luck their sweeps brought them that they insisted on their presence for all important moments.

We don't often find photographs of chimney sweeps, so this is almost certainly a rare image. The photograph was taken in Poland by Zaklad Photography, with a handwritten date on the reverse of 1932, although the image looks a bit older.