Unknown Postcard Artist: Frances Brandage and Her Adorable Characters

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Her work is familiar to every fan of decoupage - and not only. Charming angels, girls with high hairstyles and doll girls among flowers now inhabit social networks, look from postcards, embroideries, napkins … But the name and life story of their creator remain outside the brackets. Her name was Frances Brandage - and all her angels and children are not without reason in the same person …

Not so much information has come down to us about the life of Francis Brideage - despite her enormous creative heritage and popularity, which has not subsided to this day. She was amazingly efficient - and therefore no scandals or gossip are associated with her name. She led a secluded life - even her youth. To biographers and researchers, she has always been a boring American churning out sugary postcards. Only her postcards and illustrations survived all critics - and for good reason. So, it is known for certain that Frances was born in 1854 in the family of an artist - his name was Rembrandt (yes, yes!) Lockwood. Her father was an architect, woodcutter, painted church frescoes, portraits and miniatures. The first lessons were given to her by her father - lessons in painting and betrayal. When Francis was seventeen years old, he left his family, and the girl had to think about how to feed herself and her mother. However, this is only one of the versions - according to some sources, Rembrandt remained faithful to his family all his life, and Francis lived until at least twenty years without worrying about food.

It is unknown how difficult Francis's path to fame was. Quite quickly - and for a long time - she attracted the attention of large publishers and became widely known, worked on diverse orders, although she became famous for images of cute kids and smart, pretty girls. Frances performed her first watercolor work as a professional illustrator for the writer Louise May Alcott. This was followed by many orders, large and small - book illustrations, postcards, valentines, advertising posters, calendars and paper dolls.

Often, Francis's illustrations for books were printed in a separate edition and sold as postcards - they were in great demand. And not only in the USA. At home, Francis conceded the palm to the artist Maud Humphrey. The adorable Victorian kids genre was incredibly popular with female illustrators, and it was not easy to achieve notoriety. But Frances became interested in British and German publishers, and she became the first woman in her field to fill such large international orders. In addition, Francis was one of the first to come up with cut-out - not rectangular, but curly - valentines. They caused an unprecedented excitement among the American public, and Frances nevertheless defeated Maud, becoming the most popular artist in the United States of the late 19th century.

It is known that back in 1886, she began to include characters from other ethnic groups in her illustrations. In those years, in general, the depiction of dark-skinned people and Native Americans, gypsies and Asians was not a taboo for American artists. However, usually these images were caricatures, full of stereotypes. Frances did not escape this "white man's gaze." However, in her works the characters of different ethnic groups are presented as equal to each other, they hold hands, interact positively (although, of course, whites in her view look more "worthy"). She painted gypsy, Indian and black children in the same sweet, even sugary manner as whites, without exaggerating the features of their appearance. One way or another, today Francis's works are considered the first "swallows" of a positive representation of non-white people in American popular culture, an expression of the modern American ideal of equality and the value of each person.

Frances earned good money, and therefore did not have to worry about marriage - and she chose to wait for a person who is worthy of her love. At the age of thirty-two - at that time a respectable age - Frances met the artist William Tyson Brandeidge. They were soon married. Both natures are creative, but with a business acumen, they successfully worked on their own and joint projects. And, unfortunately for both artists, posters and illustrations remained their only legacy. In 1891, Francis became a mother - the long-awaited daughter was named Mary. The girl lived only a year and a half. The cause of her death is unknown. However, almost all adorable babies created by Francis Brandage are similar to each other, like twins - and not at all because the artist was not able to give them individuality. It's just that they are all a memory of little Mary, a way to give her a long life full of joys, discoveries, adventures … even if only on paper.

But the couple did not allow this tragedy to deprive them of the main thing - they still continued to work a lot and fruitfully. They moved to New York at the invitation of local publishers. In the creative baggage of Francis appeared illustrations for the legends of the Arthurian cycle and the adventures of Robin Hood. She also illustrated dramatic works, for example, by Shakespeare, in a rather ironic way - golden-haired crumbs in historical costumes are engulfed in violent "Shakespearean" passions. In fact, a similar technique - placing child characters in the context of an "adult" situation - was used by the Russian artist Elizaveta Boehm, with whom Brandage has a lot in common in an artistic sense.

Frances Brandage seems to have illustrated all American book production for young readers. This, of course, is an exaggeration - but even in her advanced years she illustrated up to two dozen books a year! In 1923, Francis experienced another difficult event - the death of William. She chose to retire from society, cut ties - and before that closed and modest, Francis became a hermit. But she did not stop working and retained her creative fervor until 1937 - until the last days of her life. And her works are still loved by hundreds of people - who, for the most part, do not know the author's name.