19.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/1Ht7Ztc
Welcome to Red Poulaine's Musings. Here we hope to entertain and delight you with stories about the people and times from bygone eras and the vintage images that act as our windows into their times. Red Poulaine is a husband and wife joint enterprise on Etsy. We take pride in offering fine, interesting vintage items to our customers, while providing the best customer service possible. Please come visit us at http://www.etsy.com/shop/redpoulaine today.
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Metropolis Star, Brigitte Helm, as the Queen of Atlantis. Ross Verlag, circa 1930
17.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/1AtT4u7
Thursday, January 8, 2015
SHE, who must be obeyed. Wonderful Gerlach portrait of Belle Artiste, circa 1905
19.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/WBJs3Q
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Sunday, September 7, 2014
SHE, who must be obeyed. Wonderful Gerlach portrait of Belle Artiste, circa 1905
19.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/WBJs3Q
Monday, August 25, 2014
Hand-Tinted Bleuet Image of Lady in Powdered Wig, circa 1920s
14.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/1lvv6Zm
Monday, August 11, 2014
Monday, April 21, 2014
Hand-Tinted Bleuet Image of Lady in Powdered Wig, circa 1920s
14.00 USD, by redpoulaine via Etsy http://ift.tt/1lvv6Zm
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Monday, June 24, 2013
Woodland Nymph Teasing Butterfly, circa 1910s
The "Naturist" movement was pervasive during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, like the common appearance of classical/fantasy romantic imagery on the picture postcard of the time, suggests to us, a turning away of the public imagination from the onslaught of the industrial age, to say nothing of the dark clouds of war, which were gathering over Europe at just about the time we believe this card was published.
If the term photo-realism is commonly used to describe a particular quality of some paintings, how about we coin the term painterly-fantasticallism for application to this photographic image?
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| AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Woodland Nymph Teasing Butterfly, Circa 1910s |
This wonderful German nude was published by die Neue Photographische Gesellschaft, or NPG. Based in Berlin, NPG was one of the largest international producers of the picture postcard during that period.
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| Reverse of Card |
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| Clear Example of NBC Logo |
The NBC was, for lack of a better term, a cartel (one of many, actually), established by a large number of German publishers of silver-bromide print photo postcards, whose intent was to control prices and maintain a competitive edge. This might be called "price fixing" today, and perhaps a blatant violation of today's trade laws, but was quite common during this period. An indication of the strength of this cartel within the industry is the great frequency with which we run into cards bearing this imprint.
Also, just for fun, it's worth noting the design of the logo itself, a blazing sun within an equilateral triangle, which was printed in a variety of colors. Like the classic eye in the triangle, this symbol is often closely associated with occult, or "secret" societies. Ah, nothing like a little conspiracy with our morning coffee. :)
In dating this card, our guess is sometime in the early 1910s. The NBC, as we wrote above, dates from 1909, and apparently was still in operation by the early 1930s, so we can only rely on our own personal experience to fix an approximate date of issue. As always, any corrections we receive from readers are not just appreciated, but sincerely requested! We often draw our information from a huge swirling mass of sources called by our sons, "teh interwebs." These sources often offer us contradictory information so any help in the navigation of these storm-tossed depths is always most welcome.
The absolutely wonderful site from which we drew all of our information on the NBC cartel, The Postcard Album, also lists an NPG logo for the publisher. The NPG logo they display is from the 1920s and very similar to the one on this card, but the NPG logo on the front of our card differs in certain respects, and without specific evidence to the contrary we have to trust our eyes. This image looks pre-1920s to us.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Images of the Fantastic in La Belle Époque
One aspect of La Belle Époque, not just in France either, was a very palpable embrace of antiquity, and though often in a rather naive fashion by today's standards, one gets the sense that people were turning away from the onslaught of the industrial explosion and towards the real, and imagined, simplicity of earlier times. With this came a sense of the possibility of magic, and the ubiquity of images like this one, in which we wouldn't be terribly surprised to see faeries or woodland sprites cavorting about.
Or, perhaps we expect at any moment to see a faun, satyr, or even Bacchus, himself!
We love the way in which the magical is suggested in these images, without the introduction of a single truly fantastic element. These images make us feel much as we might when reading a fairy tale, that at any moment something truly marvelous will happen.
Nymphs, Naiads, Dryads, and Faerie folk so often cropped up in La Belle Époque. Found throughout the period from popular entertainment to commercial advertising, these images reflected a blossoming of Western occult experimentation and a yearning for magic, for myth made manifest. We've written before of our fondness for images depicting the Marvelous Maenad, which is not only a subgenre of the "Lovely Lady" category, but of fantasy postcards, as well.
Maenads could be seductive, inviting the viewer to join them in the Bacchanal, as in the previous image, but they could also be depicted as shy and elusive creatures of the wilderness, emerging from a tangle of vines, perhaps looking back with a mixture of amusement and discomfiture at a pursuer.
Even more interesting, we think, is the fact that this new medium, the picture postcard, made available to anyone with a penny or two the possibility of possessing such an image, one in which an obviously very real human being is pictured in a fairyland setting. We take photographs for granted today, of course, but think about it for just a moment—at the turn of the 20th century, this was all entirely new. Prior to this time, fantastic photo images of human beings were seldom accessible to the common man, woman or child, and we cannot take lightly the effect of "likeness" on the human psyche, and it's worth considering the effect this mass phenomenon had on society. Mass phenomenon, you wonder? Really? Absolutely. Just as an example, in the United States alone, "the official figures from the U.S. Post Office for their fiscal year ending June 30, 1908, cite 677,777,798 postcards mailed. At that time the total population of the United States was only 88,700,000!" (Thanks to emotionscards.com for their fascinating article that provided us with that factoid.)
Leopold Reutlinger, the Belle Époque photographer, took thousands of photographs of famous Parisian actresses. These were published in black and white, cropped to close up and republished, hand tinted, glittered, sequined, published again, and when every imaginable possibility had been explored, he superimposed these images onto wonderfully fantastic, often surreal backgrounds. The "Artiste with Bird" series is one of our favorites and quite collectible. As of this writing, we have two such images, both by Reutlinger and in unusually fine condition.
Can't you just imagine these lovely ladies as heroines in fairy tales, in which for their kindness they have been rewarded the ability to speak the language of the birds? Or, perhaps the bird in the picture is actually an enchanted prince, in need of saving by the brave young woman.
One of the issues with Reutlingers "fantaisies," is that although the artiste's name was usually printed on the face of the card in its early incarnations, by the time they got to these dramatic creations, the name would often be left off. This was fine at the time, since their faces were very well known, but not today. We've been able to identify the first of these two beauties as Marguerite Brezil, but the identity of the second remains a mystery and we would welcome any clues that might shed some light on this.
These wonderful fantasy-inspired photographic images quite clearly reflect the same underlying ideals found in Victorian fairy paintings and Victorian attempts to portray fairies in photographs, a connection which ties them in with the Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In his examination of fairy paintings, Jeremy Mass identifies "the turn to mythological and fantasy elements, and in particular to the fairy's world, [ as allowing] an escape from these demands. 'No other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements of the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the drear hardships of daily existence; the stirrings of new attitudes toward sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; the birth of psychoanalysis; the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography.'" That photographs, emblematic in some eyes of the science and technology that was displacing many traditional beliefs and occupations, could be manipulated to portray the longed-for simplicity and magic of a bygone (never-was) era was marvelously ironic and ironically marvelous. Photographs, which Jeremy Mass, and many others!, fuse with conformity to a hard and unforgiving realism have, from almost the very moment they came into existence, been used to portray the world in ways the eyes are rarely able to see, providing us with visual evidence of the magic we all long to see.
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| SOLD Wood Nymph at the Well |
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| SOLD Nymph Calling Forth the Woodland Sprites circa 1905 |
We love the way in which the magical is suggested in these images, without the introduction of a single truly fantastic element. These images make us feel much as we might when reading a fairy tale, that at any moment something truly marvelous will happen.
Nymphs, Naiads, Dryads, and Faerie folk so often cropped up in La Belle Époque. Found throughout the period from popular entertainment to commercial advertising, these images reflected a blossoming of Western occult experimentation and a yearning for magic, for myth made manifest. We've written before of our fondness for images depicting the Marvelous Maenad, which is not only a subgenre of the "Lovely Lady" category, but of fantasy postcards, as well.
 |
| AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Maenad at the Garden Wall, circa 1900 |
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| AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Maenad Peering Through the Trees, circa 1910s/20s |
Leopold Reutlinger, the Belle Époque photographer, took thousands of photographs of famous Parisian actresses. These were published in black and white, cropped to close up and republished, hand tinted, glittered, sequined, published again, and when every imaginable possibility had been explored, he superimposed these images onto wonderfully fantastic, often surreal backgrounds. The "Artiste with Bird" series is one of our favorites and quite collectible. As of this writing, we have two such images, both by Reutlinger and in unusually fine condition.
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| AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Marguerite Brezil, Belle Epoque French Actress, Interspecial Romance Image by Reutlinger |
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| AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE Avian Romance Fantaisie by Leopold Reutlinger of Paris, circa 1905 |
One of the issues with Reutlingers "fantaisies," is that although the artiste's name was usually printed on the face of the card in its early incarnations, by the time they got to these dramatic creations, the name would often be left off. This was fine at the time, since their faces were very well known, but not today. We've been able to identify the first of these two beauties as Marguerite Brezil, but the identity of the second remains a mystery and we would welcome any clues that might shed some light on this.
These wonderful fantasy-inspired photographic images quite clearly reflect the same underlying ideals found in Victorian fairy paintings and Victorian attempts to portray fairies in photographs, a connection which ties them in with the Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In his examination of fairy paintings, Jeremy Mass identifies "the turn to mythological and fantasy elements, and in particular to the fairy's world, [ as allowing] an escape from these demands. 'No other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements of the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the drear hardships of daily existence; the stirrings of new attitudes toward sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; the birth of psychoanalysis; the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography.'" That photographs, emblematic in some eyes of the science and technology that was displacing many traditional beliefs and occupations, could be manipulated to portray the longed-for simplicity and magic of a bygone (never-was) era was marvelously ironic and ironically marvelous. Photographs, which Jeremy Mass, and many others!, fuse with conformity to a hard and unforgiving realism have, from almost the very moment they came into existence, been used to portray the world in ways the eyes are rarely able to see, providing us with visual evidence of the magic we all long to see.
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