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Antique Valentines
Lovers of vintage valentines can often count the ways of their affection. They’re enraptured by lace paper and the lingering hint of sachet; wooed by graceful inscriptions undimmed by time; touched by messages mingling decorum and devotion. For every lover who becomes a collector, valentines are a view to the past and a window on the soul.
Valentine’s Day is believed to have originated with the ancient mid-winter festival of Lupercalia. In the Christian era, the pagan fertility rite was renamed after Saint Valentine, martyred on February 14. Rhyming love letters were common by 1537, when Henry VIII declared Valentine’s Day a holiday. Noblemen honored their ladies with gifts of silk, lace, and jewels; the poor made do with trinkets. The first decorated paper valentine was described by diarist Samuel Pepys in 1667.
In early America, handmade paper love tokens combined ink inscriptions with pinprick, embroidery, or watercolor decorations, the latter applied freehand or with a stencil. Suitors delighted in hiding secret messages beneath “cobwebs,” “beehives,” or “flower cages,” membranes of fancifully cut tissue that could be raised by pulling a string.
Papercut silhouettes were particularly popular in the Pennsylvania German community, where the technique was call scherenschnitte. New Englanders favored the woven paper heart-and-hand, based on a popular folk motif of enduring strength and simplicity. Inside a pocket timepiece, a gentleman might tuck a watch paper decorated with a tender word, watercolor, or lock of his true love’s hair. Highly prized today is the puzzle purse, a folded and decorated paper novelty with endearments secreted inside.
Advances in papermaking, printing, and mail delivery ushered in the golden age of valentines, 1835 to 1860. Suitors sometimes penned messages on the blank centers of fine English lace paper, which was adorned with raised and pierced designs that suggested elaborate tales of courting couples, strolling troubadours, and plotting cherubs. Commercial valentines combined lace paper with shells, beads, stones, flowers, feathers, leaves, or miniature prints and paintings. For the tongue-tied, ready-made sentiments could be copied from published valentine writers or cut from sheets of colorfully printed scraps.
The daughter of a stationer and bookseller made Worcester, Massachusetts, this country’s valentine capital. Esther Howland graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1847. A year later, she launched a business selling love tokens that were hand-assembled from bits of lace paper and colored pictures, Howland sold her New England Valentine Company in 1881 to George C. Whitney, a former employee. Many of her valentines were marked with a red “H” on back before the 1870s, and with “NEVCo” afterward.
Chromolithographed cards gradually replaced lace-paper valentines, which declined in quality after 1870. These cards of die-cut cardboard whimsically combined romantic imagery with popular characters and emblems of modernity, such as the automobile. Two well-known makers were Raphael Tuck, a London printer who published the work of noted illustrators, and Louis Prang of Boston, who dominated the American greeting card industry from 1867 to 1889.
Many collectors seek out works by specific illustrators, such as Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, both published by Marcus Ward & Company. Richard Outcault, the creator of Buster Brown, and Grace Drayton, designer of the Campbell Kids, worked for Raphael Tuck & Sons. Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses, and Walt Disney lent their talents to the American cardmaker Hallmark.
Valentine’s Day is believed to have originated with the ancient mid-winter festival of Lupercalia. In the Christian era, the pagan fertility rite was renamed after Saint Valentine, martyred on February 14. Rhyming love letters were common by 1537, when Henry VIII declared Valentine’s Day a holiday. Noblemen honored their ladies with gifts of silk, lace, and jewels; the poor made do with trinkets. The first decorated paper valentine was described by diarist Samuel Pepys in 1667.
In early America, handmade paper love tokens combined ink inscriptions with pinprick, embroidery, or watercolor decorations, the latter applied freehand or with a stencil. Suitors delighted in hiding secret messages beneath “cobwebs,” “beehives,” or “flower cages,” membranes of fancifully cut tissue that could be raised by pulling a string.
Papercut silhouettes were particularly popular in the Pennsylvania German community, where the technique was call scherenschnitte. New Englanders favored the woven paper heart-and-hand, based on a popular folk motif of enduring strength and simplicity. Inside a pocket timepiece, a gentleman might tuck a watch paper decorated with a tender word, watercolor, or lock of his true love’s hair. Highly prized today is the puzzle purse, a folded and decorated paper novelty with endearments secreted inside.
Advances in papermaking, printing, and mail delivery ushered in the golden age of valentines, 1835 to 1860. Suitors sometimes penned messages on the blank centers of fine English lace paper, which was adorned with raised and pierced designs that suggested elaborate tales of courting couples, strolling troubadours, and plotting cherubs. Commercial valentines combined lace paper with shells, beads, stones, flowers, feathers, leaves, or miniature prints and paintings. For the tongue-tied, ready-made sentiments could be copied from published valentine writers or cut from sheets of colorfully printed scraps.
The daughter of a stationer and bookseller made Worcester, Massachusetts, this country’s valentine capital. Esther Howland graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1847. A year later, she launched a business selling love tokens that were hand-assembled from bits of lace paper and colored pictures, Howland sold her New England Valentine Company in 1881 to George C. Whitney, a former employee. Many of her valentines were marked with a red “H” on back before the 1870s, and with “NEVCo” afterward.
Chromolithographed cards gradually replaced lace-paper valentines, which declined in quality after 1870. These cards of die-cut cardboard whimsically combined romantic imagery with popular characters and emblems of modernity, such as the automobile. Two well-known makers were Raphael Tuck, a London printer who published the work of noted illustrators, and Louis Prang of Boston, who dominated the American greeting card industry from 1867 to 1889.
Many collectors seek out works by specific illustrators, such as Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, both published by Marcus Ward & Company. Richard Outcault, the creator of Buster Brown, and Grace Drayton, designer of the Campbell Kids, worked for Raphael Tuck & Sons. Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses, and Walt Disney lent their talents to the American cardmaker Hallmark.
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Latest page update: made by kjacobso
, Jun 19 2007, 2:13 PM EDT
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