Saturday, February 22, 2014

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.

5 comments:

Caroline said...

The net has a lot to answer for and the slow demise of the arts of making and sending postcards is certainly one of them...

A Lady's Life said...

I love it. What a nice card.

Anji said...

Caroline:... but I wouldn't be in business if it weren't for the internet!

A Lady's Life: Yes, and it had a bid as soon as we put it online.

Caroline said...

I see that my comment looks more like one of them tweet things...

Everyone now seems to be producing imagery by digital means and that work swamps out all the hand crafted work like the flower paintings.

I have spent decades treating the writing of postcards as a serious matter to inform and amuse the recipients but the last time I asks my niece to purchase a block of stamps I thought my understanding of French numbers was worse than I though because the cost was so high. Add in the cost of decent cards if you can even find them and you have spent a fortune...

At the same time the folk at the next table, we write most of our cards between courses at restaurants, have probably photographed each other with their phone or pad and sent the image to everyone they know for practically zero cost.

We have a wall with countless wine labels from memorable bottles, the wall is not covered because technology made the printing of crazy labels easy at the same time introducing glue which makes them impossible to remove, the collection more or less stopped overnight...

It is magic that it is possible to have a global business from your sitting room and we get to see glimpses of a long lost world.

Anji said...

Times are changing. Yes, it's incredible how we can share everything so rapidly today.