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Greeting card
Ludovici, Albert - Enlarge image
Greeting card
- Place of origin:
London, England (printed and published)
- Date:
1882 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Ludovici, Albert (II), born 1852 - died 1932 (designer)
Hildesheimer & Faulkner (printer and publisher) - Materials and Techniques:
Colour lithograph, ink on card
- Credit Line:
Bequeathed by Guy Tristram Little
- Museum number:
E.2413-1953
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case TECHS
"Object Type
This card is one of a series of prize-winning greetings cards printed by colour lithography.
Time
The set of cards of which this card is a part parodied the Aesthetic Movement, including its followers' style of dress and particular love of lilies and oriental objects. The printers, Hildesheimer and Faulkner, described the series in 1882, 'A. Ludovici contributes some clever satirical sketches of Esthetes, then in the time of Patience", the favourite butts for mild ridicule'. 'Patience' here refers to the Gilbert and Sullivan comic-opera whose lyrics included a description of an aesthetic young man:
'A Japanese young man
A blue and white young man
Francesca di Rimini miminy piminy
Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!
A pallid and thin young man
A haggard and lank young man
A greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery
Foot-in-the-grave young man!'
The card's title compares to a poem published by the magazine Punch in the previous year (1881) which ended with a reference to Oscar Wilde:
'And many a maiden will mutter
When Oscar Looms large on her sight
He's quite too consummately utter
As well as too utterly quite'.
Materials & Making
Greetings cards began to be first printed by colour lithography in the 1860s. Until this point the cards were generally handmade. With the advent of steam-powered presses and other technological improvements it was possible to mass-produce comparatively cheap colour-printed images for the first time.
