Raphael Kirchner was born in Vienna, attended the Vienna Conservatory (the University of Music and Performing Arts), and seemed initially destined to become a musician, but apparently he was physically not robust enough to pursue music as a career. So he decided to become a dedicated and highly original postcard artist instead, initially in his native Vienna, then from 1900 onwards in Paris, and eventually, after the outbreak of World War One, which made life for an Austrian in France rather difficult, in New York City, where he lived until a ruptured appendix led to his death, much too early, in 1917.

The Kirchner Girl

Most of Kirchner’s postcards feature women, or more precisely a particular slender, sensuous and alluring yet also strangely innocent type of woman, the “Kirchner Girl”, that he basically created from scratch with his images. In an article published in The Sketch soon after his death, the Kirchner Girl, who is said to have been the first ‘pin-up girl’ in history, is described like this:

“She is not always supremely beautiful or supremely well developed. Her features have not the austere regularity, the aloof and cold expression of the classical goddess type, her figure is graceful and slender rather than majestic and statuesque. In brief, she is the girl of every day, ‘the girl in the street’, but redeemed from the commonplace by dainty clothes and imbued with an amiable spirit. She is cosy and loving and eminently approachable. She is just the girl to take out to the theatre, and to supper afterwards, if there is time! She is femininity personified, not an ‘impossible she’ but the ideal companion of the average man’s dreams.”