Vintage Cats on Postcards
Cats in the Profile can Bring Cats on Cards
On postcard sharing sites, it's often a custom to write a little profile indicating what you are interested in. When someone is given your address and gets ready to mail you a postcard, they might just work quite hard to find a card that would fit your particular interests. I am guessing cats and vintage are particularly common in postcard sharing profiles, so I have collected a few high quality vintage cat design postcards here. Maybe it will give postcard collectors and postcard senders some ideas!
Vintage, or Like-Vintage?
Some Zazzlers will post products with a great description and others will just post cool art for us to enjoy and leave us guessing as to origins. This particular cat is tagged as vintage, but we have no further information. It's entitled Cat and Letter; letters make up part of the illustration but we have no information as to when the cat was drawn, nor by whom and maybe we can get a clue as to the provenance of the writing by looking, but maybe not. This vintage cat postcard may simply be a cat postcard with a distressed and vintage look. I love it!
If Zazzle should send me a penny or two when someone buys something I have carefully chosen to display on this blog, the price stays the same. The card costs nothing extra. For the reader, my quest to find and post some nice cards in which you might be interested, adds nothing to the cost.
Memory Lane
When I was a kid, paper dolls were still a thing. I am in love with this adorable Halloween paper doll postcard, which is attributed to Grace Drayton as part of her Dolly Dingle paper doll oevre. The Zazzler has done some work to update this adorable piece which she calls
retro. Drayton was working early in the twentieth century, so we may be talking super-retro here, as this particular cute little cherubic-faced Halloween Witch may date as far back as 1910. We don't know what kind of updating has been done. Many Zazzlers will find designs which have fallen out of copyright and will clean them up a little and use them to make mugs, postcards, shirts and more. Others will take pieces of the designs and create something entirely new for a POD (print on demand) poster or greeting card or even maybe a keychain. I am not sure what is the case here. Has this design been used as-is? Or has it been cut up and rearranged? Perhaps a fan of Drayton and her Campbell Soup advertising work will chime in and let us know a little more about this sweet little girl with her witch hat and dress and her scary pumpkin and sweet little lucky black cat. I didn't love the way this illustration fit on the card, so I added a color coordinated border, because that kind of permutation is easily done on Zazzle's design tool. Speaking of the design tool, I checked out the illustration using the design to ascertain that the art will look good when printed, and it seems it will. But I'm not so sure about the text. It does not seem super sharp. As always with POD sites, Caveat Emptor! Check everything out carefully before you add something to your cart.
Art Nouveau
This Julie de Graag cat is definitely vintage, dating from 1918. De Graag was a part of the Art Nouveau movement, working at the turn of the 19th Century. After growing up in The Hague, she studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and became a celebrated draftsman, graphic artist and painter. Her refined graphic work and sharp lined engravings are still celebrated to this day. As such, her vintage cat postcard seen here would be a lovely treat for any collector who loves vintage cats, or Dutch art. You may also find postcard site participants who appreciate certain colors. Orange and Black lovers will want this card.
Sometimes you are not sure if it's vintage. All you know is that it looks good! Is this cat on the moon a historical find? Or is it a drawing made to look vintage? I am having trouble finding more information about this
Black Cat on the Moon Postcard so I can't say for sure. All I know is that this is a popular design and is for sale on many of the popular POD sites, appears on Pinterest in quite a few versions, some with artist signature and some without. This design is already probably well known to anyone hoping to find a novel vintage cat postcard on my little blog post, lol. So I probably should be showing something else in this spot. But this is a super sweet blue and yellow postcard with an adorable little star, and a Yellow Man In the Moon upon which is seated our Black Cat. This card is sure to be treasured by any cat lover who finds it in his mailbox one day even if they have already seen this illustration somewhere in internet land.
Repurposing Old Books
We'll finish up with this lovely vintage cat postcard repurposed by Artist and Zazzler Shelli Fitzpatrick. After finding the image of the beautiful red headed child, in an antique story book, Fitzpatrick cleaned the image up, colorized it, added a border and affixed a cat lover's quote. The child is petting a cute black kitten with a ribbon around its neck. Another nice treat for a cat-loving postcrosser who is eagerly waiting for a postcard to come from parts unknown and bring delight to the mailbox.
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