Printable Vintage Illustrations: Sunday Morning, 1886

You never know these days. Uninvited guests may force you to take an unplanned trip to an unknown destination; doesn’t hurt to be in your Sunday clothes.
― Anurag Shourie, Half A Shadow

Sundays are like confetti floating in the air in slow motion, in the evening they reach the ground and you hope a bit of wind could blow on them so they could fly a bit longer.
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

1886 illustration of two ladies in their Sunday best. You can download the high-res illustrations in one 6" x 6" @ 300 ppi JPEG here. Larger image size available for licensing. Please inquire.


For personal use only. Not for resale. All digitized work by The Real Victorian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please cite RealVictorian.com as your source when sharing or publishing.

Vintage Art Appreciation: Hydrangeas by Philip Wilson Steer

Hydrangeas, c1901 by Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942).
Oil on canvas. Public domain, colours enhanced.

The model for this painting was probably Miss Ethel Warwick, as may be deduced from a portrait of her in the National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town, also of 1901, in which she is apparently wearing the same lace-edged jacket. Related drawings are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Steer sketchbooks. (Source: The Fitzwilliam Museum)

Ethel Warwick, 1924
Ethel Maude Warwick (1882–1951) who likely posed for the painting abov became an artists model to help pay for her tuition at the London Polytechnic where she herself was studying to be an artist. This led to her meeting Herbert Draper; Draper used her as a model for several of his paintings, including The Lament for Icarus. Through him she became a favoured model for several artists, including John William Godward and Linley Sambourne, for whom she posed nude in a series of photographic studies. She was also sketched by James McNeill Whistler.

Ethel Warwick, 1930

Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain paintings are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Printable Vintage Illustration: Girl on a Bench, 1896

He looked at her. She was pretty still, with thick hair and soft eyes, and she moved so gracefully that it almost seemed as though she were gliding. He'd seen beautiful women before, though, women who caught his eye, but to his mind, they usually lacked the traits he found most desirable. Traits like intelligence, confidence, strength of spirit, passion, traits that inspired others to greatness, traits he aspired to himself.
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

1896 illustration of a girl on a bench from my own collection. You can download the high-res illustration as a 4.25" x 5.5" @ 300 ppi JPEG here. Larger image size available for licensing. Please inquire.


For personal use only. Not for resale. All digitized work by The Real Victorian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please cite RealVictorian.com as your source when sharing or publishing.

Printable Vintage Art: East River Park by William James Glackens

East River Park, c1902
by William James Glackens (1870–1938)

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Sources:
[1] Original image from Wikimedia.
[2] The Real Victorian's enhanced version of the illustration (seen above), downloadable as a 8" x 10" @ 300 ppi JPEG. Please note this is a large file of roughly 30mb.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain paintings are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Printable Vintage Illustration: The Snow, 1902

The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.
― e.e. cummings

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
― Mary Oliver

Originally a vintage ad from 1902 for Crème Simon lotion. You can see a large bottle of the face cream in the foreground on the coffee table. It is supposed to provide the best protection against snow and wind, hence the coquette standing in front of the open window.

You can download the high-res illustration as a 4.25" x 5.5" @ 300 ppi JPEG here. Larger image size available for licensing. Please inquire.


For personal use only. Not for resale. All digitized work by The Real Victorian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Please cite RealVictorian.com as your source when sharing or publishing.