The Fun and Passion of Modern Postcards, Part I
by Roy Nuhn

This month marks the 224th birthday of the American nation. Next year’s being the 225th, somewhat of a special anniversary, might be the inspiration for some special patriotic cards. Or, maybe not. Since the end of World War II, into our modern era of post cards, only the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965, the Bicentennial celebration back in 1976, and the centennial of the Statue of Liberty a few years later, have we had any sort of publishing concentration of patriotics. Cards at other times were, of course, printed and sold, but only sparingly. Highlighted in this article are a few patriotic post cards of the second half of the last century. Though the 4th of July was a week, or so, ago, these should still be of interest. After all, collectors of old or new cards have always had great affection for patriotics and Americana.

Artist Sketch – J.L.G. Ferris

In the years from 1900 to 1930, painter J.L.G. Ferris created a series of 78 historical scenes portraying the nation’s past from the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, in 1492, to the beginning of World War I. Today his artwork is the largest intact series of American historical paintings by a single artist. Ferris devoted the last 30 years of his life to recapturing the greatness of the American experience on canvas. Even more remarkable, his paintings were not for sale. He did not want the visual, effectiveness of his paintings to be lost selling them off one at a time; they were to be viewed as a whole.

Ferris had a mission in life. The first half of his life - years of growing up, of art training and years of studying worldwide and at home in Philadelphia the great paintings of the past and present, came during the last four decades of the 19th century. This was an age when historians, artists and craftsmen of all types - from architects and writers to furniture designers and painters, philosophers, educators, and the public, in general, looked backward to the greatness of our country’s past. Rightly so have these years been called the “American Renaissance,” a time when all things American began to be considered important and our past glorious. No longer would European ideas, models and movements influence us so greatly. Beginning with the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, it lasted until the decade or so, before World War I, when technology, invention and the marvels of the machine became dominant.

Ferris was one small part of this cultural movement. His paintings, so painstakingly researched to the tiniest detail, added a humanistic touch to the grandeur of the American past as it found its way onto his canvas. Like many of his contemporaries he made the great and small figures of America’s great pageant seem more lifelike, much more human, and less the gods and mythological heroes they were once thought to be.
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris was born in Philadelphia on August 18, 1863. His father was a well-known portrait painter and etcher, his mother the sister of three popular artists. Small wonder that he received much encouragement to become an artist. His father was his first teacher.

In 1879 he was enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, located in Philadelphia. There he received the best possible art education in America from the finest teachers in the country. With his father, he made several trips to Europe to study the paintings of Europe’s best. In 1883 he was sent to the Academie Julian, in Paris, to study with the world’s most respected teachers of the time. In France he was drawn into the current anti-establishment art movement of the day, one, which advocated the combination of the traditional academic approach with a free style, and which eventually came to be called “impressionism.” A close study of Ferris’s paintings shows traces of French impressionism.

Always drawn to American history, the young man easily gravitated in that direction when it came time to earn his own way in the world. However, it was the financial, as well as the moral, support of his family that enabled him to keep painting. His first major painting was sold in 1898, “General Howe’s Levee, 1777,” when he was 35 years old. And upon reflection, he regretted selling it because his dream of putting together the American epic in a series of paintings would not work if they were sold off individually. And so, with the arrival of the new century, J.L.G. Ferris buckled down to his life’s major work, the creation of that saga in oils. He vowed never again to sell any of these paintings. To support himself he did book and magazine illustrations, miscellaneous historical paintings not part of his special series and, of great interest to us, reproduction rights to the many pictures he was creating for his saga. It is from these paintings that the post cards we do have of Ferris’s artwork came from. A few will be found on the older pre-1920 cards. The most reproduced of all his scenes is “Lincoln and the Counterbands,” showing the president with a group of former slaves in the occupied South at war’s end.

International Art used it for one of its unnumbered post cards and then also printed the same picture on blank-back cards for use by advertisers, such as H.D. Foss & Co. Quality Premier Chocolates (Boston) and Dr. D. Jayne’s (seller and maker of all sorts of medicines, who added their own promotional messages). This painting and several others of Ferris’s historical series showed up on other cards, mostly by small or unknown publishers. A number were used on linens, and in the post-World War II chrome era, quite a few were reprinted, especially for the Bicentennial in 1976.

In our modern times the most effective use of them as a group was by Paw Paw Plastics Laminating Service, Inc., Paw Paw, Michigan. In 1972 they printed and sold an 18-card continental size chrome-like set of Ferris’s paintings. As late as 1984 dealers were still selling them at retail for $5 a set to collectors, and also to the general public.
The Ferris paintings, after being exhibited for many years at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, eventually returned to the Ferris family who licensed the use of their images to a number of firms. J.L.G. Ferris had died in 1930.

CHECKLIST
Set of 18, published by Paw Paw, Paw Paw, Michigan (1972).
Betsy Ross - 1777
Hudson, the Dreamer - 1609
The Marriage Contract - 1789
The First Thanksgiving - 1621
Father Abraham - 1865
The American Cincinnatus - 1783
The Rail Splitter
Let Us Have Peace - 1865
The Return of Miles Standish
Home for Christmas – 1784
The Landing of William Penn
Franklin’s Bookshop - 1745
Writing the Declaration of Independence - 1776
The Mayflower Compact - 1620
The Gettysburg Address - 1863
The Christmas Coach - 1795
The Bell’s First Note – 1753
We Have Met the Enemy and They are Ours - 1813

Reprinted with permission from Barr’s Post Card News, Semimonthly, World’s Largest Deltiologist Newspaper, 70 S. Sixth Street, Lansing, IA 52151. 1-800-397-0145; 1-319-538-4500; Fax 1-319-538-4038; Website: www.bpcn.com; Email: bpcn@salmander.com.