Description: This Set of (6) Victorian Trade Cards are pictures of Children Doing Different Activities. The activities are; Chasing Geese with Horn Instruments, Boy Putting Crown of Flowers On Girl's Head, Boy Performing Marriage, Boy Conducting Marching Band, Boy Making Speech to Military, Boy Soldier Reading Document to Crowd. Colors are pastel and charming.
Brief History of Trade Cards by Ben Crane. Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful.
By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America's products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly-colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook. Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm.
The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective. Although trade card collecting began over 100 years ago, today's strong interest in trade cards began relatively recently. The store was founded as a small shop in. The founder was Aristide Boucicaut. It was a fixed-price department store from about 1850. It was a successful business, and a new building was constructed for the store first by Louis-Auguste Boileau in 1869 at 24, rue de Sèvres, where it remains today. Alexandre Laplanche ornamented Boileau's ironwork technology. Louis-Charles Boileau, his son, continued the store in the 1870s, consulting the firm of Gustave Eiffel for parts of its structure.Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, the grandson of Louis-Auguste Boileau, worked on an extension to the store in the 1920s. A picture of the store is on the card.
Each Card Measure 5-3/8" W x 4-1/8" H. Condition: Corners and edges are slightly worn.