Amazing Whimsical Collages

I just couldn't help myself - I've created some great whimsical collages composed of old master paintings, antique ephemera from my books and cards, and lots of great lettering. The result is a beautiful collection of amazing women. I have more to follow!

Gemini Gothic Whimsical Collage Butterfly Women Poster by antiqueart
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Vintage Taurus Fantasy Gothic Whimsical Collage Poster by antiqueart
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Vintage Mermaid Aquarius Gothic Whimsical Woman Poster by antiqueart
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John Singer Sargent Carnation Lily

I've always been inspired by this image, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" by artist John Singer Sargent. According to the Tate.org website, Sargent was inspired to paint this picture while boating on the Thames in England in 1885, where he saw Chinese lanterns hanging among trees and lilies. (read more here: Summary from The Tate).

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent Perfect Poster by antiqueart
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This is an amazing image - one of the few that John Singer Sargent painting in the impressionist style (versus his well-known stunning dark portraits.) The name Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose is after a popular song in the 1880s, which Sargent and friends would sing at the piano.

The painting shows two small children dressed in white, almost fairy-like, softly lighting Chinese lanterns in a wild garden, surrounded by tall white lilies. The sun is in decline, and the mood suggests a magical party is about to begin.

Penny Farthing Bicycle

Penny Farthing High-wheeler bicycle

Mom and I had an antique shop when I was young. We'd go to auctions to buy some of our inventory, and I'd often see a Penny Farthing bicycle sitting in the rafters of the auction house, waiting to come down to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Those days, they weren't so rare as today, and you could buy your own for a couple hundred dollars. Now, if you find one of them out in the country auctions, they tend to be in poor condition - ratty seats and unusable tires, and you'd pay 10 times the price.

The penny farthing bicycle, also called a high-wheeler, was a common fashion symbol for highbrow Victorian ladies and gentlemen who loved to show off the new rage in sports gear.

This image of a penny farthing shows the huge front tire and tiny back tire - a dangerous sport that eventually led to its demise.

High Wheeler Victorian Penny Farthing Cycle Biking Poster by antiqueart
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High Wheeler Victorian Penny Farthing Cycle Biking Wood Wall Art by antiqueart
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Alice in Wonderland Collage

Alice and wonderland - the original images

Alice in Wonderland never looked better! The Alice in Wonderland collages include the original John Tenniel illustration of Alice and the Dodo, Alice and the Rabbit, Alice and the Flamingo, Alice and the Cheshire cat, and the Mad Tea Party! There are also lots of vintage Victorian Alice icons.   

The Alice illustration is by Sir John Tenniel for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll published in 1911.

Alice in Wonderland Dodo Vintage Pretty Collage Perfect Poster by antiqueart
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Alice in Wonderland Flamingo Perfect Poster by antiqueart
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This lovely Alice's Adventures in Wonderland includes an original illustration with Alice looking through the curtain, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit. The book was written by Lewis Caroll in 1865, where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and is involved in a wonderland of fantasy. It includes this quote by alice, "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense."

Alice in Wonderland Hatter and Rabbit Canvas Print by antiqueart
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History of Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau and Vienna

 I've been on quite a Youtube kick for a while -- what a great place to go to learn about the history of art. Here's a wonderful video on the history of Art Nouveau -- it gives you a background on some of the famous artists of one of the greatest movements of art. I've been to Vienna to experience the history of all things nouveau, and have found it exuberant. Here, in this great video, you'll see a "klimt barbie"...

History of Art Nouveau

What a wonderful European city - Vienna - that started the Art Nouveau movement. The video is an hour long, but it's a great documentary. Enjoy!

How to paint like Monet

How to paint like Monet: Lessons on Impressionist landscape painting techniques It's always interesting to see a demo showing how famous artists progressed in their panintgs. Here's a tutorial by artist Will Kemp.

Claude Monet Working at Giverny Video

Rare film of artist Claude Monet at work in his garden in Giverny. Awesome view of the great artist at work!

Animals in Art: Fox Drawings and Designs

The Fox - Vintage Collage
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The Fox in Art History

It's only recently that the Fox was depicted as a nice animal. Most of the images from the Victorian era show the animal with an angry face, as if to say to the children of the time, "beware!" Occasionally, though, the Victorians broke through their bias toward evil foxes and showed them with bright, nice faces in beautiful scenery like the advertising showing the arctic fox below.

Victorian Advertising Showing Arctic Fox

Folklore Fox

In Medieval European folklore, the fox Reynard was a fable about an anthropomorphic, trickster red fox. Renyard persists in today's literature and art images of foxes, and can be seen worldwide in advertising, comics, and current-day fables showing the fox in a man's clothing.

As a symbol, Celtics believed the fox to be wise, and a guide in the spirit world; in Japan, the fox was a rain spirit, and symbolized longevity and protection. Northern Native Americans believed the fox was wise and noble, while Plains tribes thought it was a trickster.

It's a Cats World Illustration

It's a Cat's World Antique Book Illustration
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A Cat's World

This antique cat illustration is based on the cover of an antique book called, "Prang's Natural History Series for Children" first published in 1878. The cat's head is surrounded by all the wonderful cat's world images a happy cat can imagine: a garden, a bird, a squirrel are painted into this illustration.

Antique New York Ephemera Collage

New York Statue of Liberty Collage of Antique Art
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New York, New York

New York City is an amalgam of many different images. The Statue of Liberty welcomes the visitor to New York, while the visit involves much love, architecture, and sweet images of beautiful things. This image is a collage of the New York Love experience - old fashioned lace, roses, and little bits of impressions of the city. This New York Image is composed of antique lace, old postcards, and greeting cards from antique stores - a bit of New York ephemera, so to speak. So, what was once a bunch of lovely old antique images becomes an art piece that is quite new and relevant.

Christmas Art for Victorians!

Christmas Tree Ornament

Victorian Christmas Chocolate Advertising Art

I love a beautiful Victorian Christmas.

The Victorian art era was full of magazine illustraitons showing old-fashioned red-cheeked children ready to decorate the Christmas tree and playing in the snow.

The most magic time of year, Christmas was awesome for people in the 1800s, and the art at that time celebrated the incredible joy they had over this season. While many of the poorer families could only give their children a small token, those in the upper classes showered their children with gifts, much like they do today. The Victorian advertising art back then really played up the wonderful time of year -- they illustrated beautiful chubby children who loved the season! And, of course, Santa Claus!

The vintage illustratiuon is based on a magazine advertisement by Bakers Cocoa and Chocolate, showing a beautiful illustration of a Christmas basket stuffed full of chocolate. The old father with the top hat is carrying his red-hooded child, who is holding her Christmas goodies in the basket.

The Origin of Christmas Art

Vintage Christmas Art

Christmas art inspires us to look back at earlier years when Christmas traditions were young. What was Christmas like when our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up? The vintage Christmas images printed on postcards and in Victorian Christmas books give us a clue -- Vintage Christmas celebrations were just as popular then as they are today. The antique art that we still see today in antique shops from the early 1900s and late 1800s show an abundance of sweet paintings of Santa Claus, holly, Christmas trees, and red-cheeked children with wide grins.
 

Vintage Santa and Angels Gallery Wrapped Canvas by antiqueart
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Commercial Christmas Art

 In the first half of the 1900s, Christmas celebrations ranged from home-made ornaments and gifts to department store toys. The oil lamps and candles on trees in the 1800s gave way to electric lights and bulbs around 1913. Vintage Christmas was transformed into a commercial bevy of products laden with Santa Claus images -- most of these early commercial images were crafted quite well with exquisite attention to detail.

Christmas has emerged today as quite a different celebration than its origins, and its art has emerged and modernized as well. Christmas started with old customs that dated back to the merger of traditions from Pagan Europe and early Christianity. By medieval days, The main figurehead became Father Christmas. Father Christmas was portrayed with a long beard and cloak, but would be shown wearing blue, green, brown or red suits. By 1910, Santa Claus standardized on the red suit he wears today.

Vintage Santa Christmas Music Christmas Ornaments by antiqueart
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Image of Father Christmas and Odin

Today's image of Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, started with the Norse God Odin, the ruler of Asgard. Odin wore a blue cloak and had a long white beard and a wreath around his head. Modern-day Santa Claus merged Odin with the Christian legend of Saint Nicholas of Myra who visited Dutch children on Christmas eve to replace straw-filled shoes with sweets. Father Christmas came to represent the Christmas spirit of goodwill.

During the Victorian (late 1800s) and Edwardian periods (early 1900s), inexpensive printing methods brought the image of Santa and Christmas to everyone -- in the form of children's books and Christmas cards. The commercialization of Christmas began.. The images of Father Christmas (Santa Claus) became well established as the definitive figurehead of the Christmas season.

Vintage Santa Claus Art

Kriss Kringle Stories of Santa
Christmas Ornament

Victorian Kriss Kringle 

The history of today's view of Santa Claus started with the Dutch legend of Sinter Klaas. In 1809, Washington Irving, under the pseudonym Dietrich Knickerbocker, described St. Nicholas arriving on St. Nicholas’s eve. In 1823, Clement Clark Moore wrote "The Night Before Christmas" which added the rendeer names and other details about Santa. In the early Victorian days, Santa was dressed in green and was often depicted as quite skinny. Thomas Nast, illustrating for Harper's Illustrated Magazine, showed Santa as a bit rounder in the 1860s-1880s. Then, in 1931, Santa emerged quite round and jolly in Coca-Cola ads.

Santa Claus has gone by many names through the past 150 years.

Saint Nick, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, and Kriss Kringle, to name a few. Kris Kringle was a popular name for Santa in the 19th Century. This illustration is from the cover of an antique children's book about Kris Kringle from the late 1800s. Santa Claus is emerging from the fireplace, as if floating on the smoke, Christmas bag on his back, full of toys and goodies for the lucky children on his Christmas list. The Victorian illustration shows the moment when Kris Kringle emerges and finds a Christmas child, asleep in the chair, waiting for Santa to show up.

Victorians Primed for Comemrcial Advertising Art

Victorian Advertising Art

Children Riding Ponies Greeting Card

While advertising certainly existed way before the 1870s, Victorians energized it to an art form. Victorian trade cards were beauties. These little cards were printed in full color -- quite an expensive process prior to this time -- and featured lovely children, gorgeous young women, or scenes depicting life at the time. A company's advertising showed up in a nondescript part of the card -- often at the bottom of the image or on the back of the card.

What made these cards work perfectly for advertisers was that the great art made them highly collectible. Consumers would grab them, take them home, and keep them. They would buy the products they'd advertise. The better the art, the more sought after they were by collectors.

Victorian Trade Cards

Trade cards' emergence was ignited by the invention of lithography in 1870s. Lithography allowed full color images to be mass produced. Many trade cards were purchased from printers from among their stock images. Stock cards had illustrations that could be used for any product, such as the face of a beautiful girl, and would suffice for almost any kind of business to print their names and addresses. Custom-made cards were created too, although they would be more costly, but these were better, because artists could be consigned to include the product as part of the illustration.

Puppy Taking a Bath Button by antiqueart
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Victorian Lithography Process

The lithographic process was quite tedious. First, the artist would create the picture. The picture would then be given to the printer to place each of the the colors used in the picture on specially prepared limestones. Lower quality cards would use up to five colors, while higher quality would have included 20 or more. Cards would be printed by laying one stone after stone, the colors of each stone superimposing on the previous. Good registration was key to getting all the print runs in order, although increasing sophistication in lithographic printing presses made it easier and sped up the process.

By the early 1900s, lithography trade cards started to disappear because halftone printing allowed color advertising in newspapers and magazines. These halftone advertisements were cheaper to run and would get into more peoples' hands. An improvement for the advertisers, but a disappointment to those of us who still collect these beautiful old Victorian trade cards today.

French Chocolate Party Posters

Bock Beer Goats Bag

Sailboat Cigar Label Vintage Spiral Notebooks

Vintage drinking bear square stickers

Vintage Flower Bluebell Floral Illumination

Floral Pattern from the 1800s

This delightful floral pattern is from an illuminated manuscript from the 1800s. The art of illumination refers to books that provide decoration that supplements the text. Illumination is most often done with decorated initials, borders, and sometimes miniature illustrations. Gold and silver were the traditional materials used for illumination, and color is sometimes used for impact. Examples of illuminated manuscrips can be found as far back as the 400s, and may still exist from the middle ages. This example is late - from the mid-1800s.

This beautiful vintage floral design was created in the 1873 as an illumination for the book called "The book illuminator to the Queen," Marcus Ward. It shows beautifully drawn blue and pink flowers (it looks like they're bluebells and carnations), and swirls of green and blue leaves and acanthus greenery. The floral pattern is just one small image from a huge work of illuminations and designs by Marcus Ward.

Marcus Ward's design company, Marcus Ward and Company, was based in Belfast in the 1800s. Marcus Ward and Company started out creating stationery, bindery, and printing, and later did color lithography. This florial design was printed in 1873, in a book entitled "A Practical Treatise on the Art of Illuminating" by Marcus Ward.

Vintage Flower Bluebell Floral Decoration

Vintage Circus Art

Victorian Circus Posters

Barnum & Bailey Coney Island Poster Square Sticker

Victorians loved circuses. Back then, there was no TV or movies for entertainment. Circuses were a big draw for an entertainment-hungry audience.

Back then, there were hundreds of circuses that traveled around to fairgrounds everywhere. By the end of the 1800s, railroads made it possible to have very large circuses that carried all their gear on several cars. The large circuses toured to small towns across Europe and America.

Fun circus acts always included trick riding, jugglers, aerialists, elephants, equestrians, trapeze, and clowns, although there were specialty acts, too, such as the coney island water carnival put on by Barnum & Bailey.

Traveling circuses started out small -- in the 1700s, they involved a small group of entertainers--often a single family--and a single open air ring. Small circuses were often regular features of fairs. These early performances would include a couple of acrobats, clowns, tightrope walkers, and horses. Shows would be given several times a day, and they'd pass around a hat to collect money. At first, the circuses would travel with a few horses and wagons to carry their equipment from town to town. Audiences would stand and watch from the sidelines.

Eventually, the rings would be covered by canvas tents. By the 1820s, the traditional "big top" appeared, and seated a few hundred spectators.  By around 1880, when railroads carried the gear and large circuses evolved, the performances could seat thousands of spectators, and the big top grew even bigger.

Of course, colorful posters were placed around town to advertise the affair. These little art gems are highly sought by today's collectors of circus memorabilia.

Vintage Catalog Advertising Art

Antique Seed Catalog Fridge Magnet

The publishing business in the Victorian age, with magazines, catalogs, and newspapers, gave companies a new way to sell their wares. Which companies did well? The ones who created lusciously beautiful advertising art - very appealing images people would cut out of the newspaper and keep. This is one of the best.

Antique Burpee Seed Catalog from 1893

The 1893 image is an advertisement for Burpee Seeds, featuring a vintage cantaloupe sliced open to show the delicious melon inside. Vintage seed catalogs and packets are little pieces of fruit art, designed in a time when advertisers were looking for "wow" images that people would hold on to and remember the next time they visited their retail store..

Early Steam Power? Invention of Steampunk

Steampunk is based on Victorian design melded with modern technology. The concept of steampunk is really nothing new, even though the term Steampunk emerged in the last 20 years or so with the inventiveness of the movies Wild West and TV shows like Dr. Who. The art that has come out of the last 20 years that bring together the old with the new is astounding.

Victorians loved to conceive what might happen in the future, and they imagined great flying machines and newfangled technologies in terms they would be able to understand. In the mid-1800s, steam power, internal combustion engines, and electric power meant that anything was possible. The world was modern, and new technology was imagined. What would a future world look like to the average Victorian? An amazing magician's bag full of personal flying machines and gadgets with levers, buttons, and pulleys.

Steampunk melds the Victorian time lines with future inventions. Back then, those inventions were things like Jules Verne's submarines, and H.G. Wells' time machine.

Our image below is based on an antique postcard that was originally created in the late 1800s - showing people flying in Victorian-looking flying cars and flying dirigibles.

Chocolate Steampunk Flying Machine Poster

William Morris Wallpaper from the 1800s

Vintage Floral Wallpaper Place Mat

Vintage Floral Wallpaper Designs

William Morris was the father of the Arts and Crafts movement of art that was rampant in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Morris was basically a textile and wallpaper designer, who wanted to return to the artistic sensibilities of the Medieval artist, when there was craft that went into creating art, and the scenes were depictions of earthiness and nature. William Morris designed wallpaper and textiles in the early 1800s, and influenced Tolkien's hobbit and lord of the rings books, and the genre of fantasy and science fiction from that time until today.

William Morris produced this image in 1887 as a wallpaper design that was popular and was shown on Victorian walls. Quite busy for a whole room, but the William Morris floral designs have been reproduced ever since, for wallpaper as well as for gifts and backgrounds.

Vintage Circus Procession - Art for Children's books

Circus Procession Napkin

Circus Parade Art 

The early days of children's books showcased everything that a child wold love, and the Victorian art world was often enhanced by these talented book illustrators. While not all book illustrations were great, this image of a Circus Procession was one of the many illustrations that was successful.

In the Victorian days, circuses were preceded by a big parade to announce their arrival in town. These parades would attract crowds, and the by-standers would follow the parade to the circus grounds, where the performers would set up the show.

Circuses included elephants, following each other by holding on to each others' tails. Wagons were pulled by horses and camels. Lions and tigers often had their own wagons. People and animals alike would wear exotic costumes. Posters were placed along the parade routes to announce the circus was in town. Eventually, by the late 1800s, these parades grew to be miles long, with hundreds of performers, horses, elephants and animal cages in the circus procession. Circus processions could take hours to wind their way through cities along their parade route.