Golden Age Postcard Artists

Gertrud Caspari’s Postcards: A Breath of Childhood Wonder

My favourite children’s postcard artist is the German illustrator Gertrud Caspari (1873-1948). During her lifetime she was famous for her picture books and decorative wall friezes. Sadly, today she is virtually forgotten by the German public, although some of her books are still available and the original editions sought after by collectors of old children’s books. Her output was quite remarkable. She wrote and illustrated more than 50 books, which reached a total print run of 8 million copies. She also designed murals, wall charts for schools, advent calendars, board games, advertisements, figurines, and last but not least more than 200 postcards.

Gertrud Caspari was born in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1873. For the first ten years of her life she had a sheltered childhood, until her father, a well-to-do merchant, became critically ill and could no longer run his business. With virtually no income her mother had to rely on the goodwill of relatives and friends to support her five children. Gertrud was later trained to be a teacher and apparently never dreamt of becoming a professional artist. However, when she was aged 24 she came down with Graves’ disease, which confined her to her bed for several years. Having not much better to do, she began to work on a book for children, which was finally published in 1903: “The Living Toys”. To everybody’s surprise, the book was a great success, and soon she was showered with requests for more. Caspari happily complied, and it didn’t take long for her to become a household name. It didn’t make her rich, though. Apparently she was paid very little for her work, and she had to support her mother and one of her sisters with whom she lived until their death in the 1930s. During the air-raid on Leipzig in 1943 all her manuscripts, drawings and original printing plates and most of her possessions were destroyed. When the war was over, she had nothing left and spent the rest of her days in poverty. She died in a hospital in Dresden in 1948 at the age of 75.

Although Caspari never married and had no children of her own, it is obvious that she loved them and was fascinated and intrigued by what she must have seen as the innocence of early childhood. Her imaginary world was populated by children, and by children only. No grown-up intruders anywhere. There are toys and frequently animals in her pictures, but it is a place far removed from the complications of adulthood, far removed from even the possibility of poverty, war, loss, and death. It is a peaceful place, which Caspari may have yearned to go back to when she watched her nephews and nieces and the many children in the neighbourhood play. It was on them that she modelled the children she painted. Those children are always small, between one and five years old. As a rule, they are presented to us as deeply lost in some world of their own: sometimes playing childhood games, sometimes trying to converse with animals, but mostly just standing there and looking, discovering the world anew, as if had just been created five minutes ago – which of course, to them, it was. Caspari’s pictures emanate a stillness and contentedness, and at the same time a deep sense of joy and wonderment, that is unmatched by other illustrators of the time: the joy and wonder of being alive and being placed in a world that contains so many exciting things. And the most exciting things are the little ones: colours and sounds and textures, animals and blossoming trees, things that move by themselves, day and night, the cold white of the snow and the warmth of the sun, and, of course, the change of the seasons, spring to summer to autumn to winter, each distinctive and each with its own special delights.

Caspari’s first postcards were published in 1902. Most of them were issued by the presumably German publisher Erika (although this might also have been the trademark used by some publisher unknown to me). Incidentally, some of Raphael Kirchner’s postcards appeared under the same label. Other publishers of Caspari postcards were Meissner & Buch (Leipzig), Richard Keutel (Stuttgart), R. Voigtländer (Leipzig) in Germany, K.F. Editeurs (Paris) in France, and in England Davidson Bros. with at least one set of cards showing “little chicks”. Most of the cards have no particular title and bear merely generic captions such as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter” in various languages, in German, English, and French, but also quite often in Swedish and Finnish, providing evidence for Caspari’s widespread popularity in Europe and, somewhat surprisingly, particularly in Scandinavia. The majority of cards are signed, usually with G. Caspari, sometimes with her full name Gertrud Caspari, sometimes only with her initials G.C.

Her last cards appeared in 1933. When the Nazis took over in Germany, there was no longer room for childhood dreams as gentle and peaceloving as hers. Different dreams replaced them, dreams of power and dominance. But Caspari’s postcards have survived those fatal dreams and bear witness to a different and ultimately far more wholesome way of looking at the world which we are all lucky enough to inhabit.

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