The Golden Age
of
Artist-Drawn
Picture Postcards

— Curator’s Introduction —

I am Mickey Cellarius. For more than 20 years now, I have collected artist-drawn picture postcards from the golden age of postcards, which for me starts at around 1902 and ends in the 1930s. I am pretty passionate about it, much to my wife’s dismay. By now I have assembled more than 20,000 postcards, which is far too many to display them all on a private website. I have tried to get institutional backing to digitalise them all and make them publicly available, but that hasn’t worked out. Not yet at least. In the meantime, I have now created this site to show you at least some of those many wonderful images and to share what I was able to find out about the artists who designed them.

Some of those artists are well-known, while others are almost completely forgotten. All we know of many of them is the name they used to sign their work with. And there are of course also many beautiful cards that are not signed at all, which makes it even harder to identify the person that designed them. But that is of course also what makes collecting artist-drawn picture postcards such a fascinating hobby. It’s the thrill of the discovery: of images you didn’t know existed and of the names (and lives) of the artists that created them.

It would be a shame if those artists and the images they created were forgotten for good. If they were, we’d be losing entire worlds of imagination and artistic expression. But not only that. Those artists and their work deserve to be remembered. I very much hope this website will help save at least some of them from oblivion. Doing them justice won’t be easy, and it will take me quite some time to get to them all, so if you don’t find an artist you were expecting to find here, please be patient. This archive will keep growing and will keep adding artist pages for quite some time. And as soon as I have a decent number of subscribers (which is free of course), I will also start blogging on some of my most interesting finds.

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions or suggestions, or simply want to share your knowledge about postcard artists with me, which I might then – with your permission – also share with the visitors to this virtual museum of an (almost) forgotten art form. You can contact me by email. Eventually you will also be able to leave comments on my blog posts, but not just yet.