By Robert Reed

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, April 2006

About a hundred years ago, Americans began exchanging Easter greeting postcards with each other, especially with friends and relatives. As the greeting style picture postcard gained more and more popularity in the early years of the last century, all of our holidays were soon being celebrated with cards especially designed for such a purpose. , Among these special days was Easter.

Practically every publisher, who did not limit itself to view cards, manufactured greeting cards for the Easter holiday. This provide quite a bit of work for the era's artists, most of whom, then as now, were freelancers.

Nearly all the commercially successful artists of that distant day, as well as a small army of unknowns, who were employed directly or on a freelance basis by the many postcard publishers in this country, drew Easter designs. Across the Atlantic, their counterparts in England and in Europe enjoyed similar prosperity.

The honor roll includes such luminaries as H. B. Griggs, Rose O'Neill, M. E. Price, Ellen Clapsaddle and Frences Brundage. Overseas, there was Jenny Nystrom in Sweden, Mabel Lucie Attwell and G. E. Shepheard in England, and Achille Mauzan in Italy.

If you are a Rose O'Neill or a Kewpie fan, than you already know she created at least 13 Easter drawings for Gibson Art Co., about a fifth of her grand total for the Cincinnati, Ohio, firm. These depict her Kewpies playing with baby chickens and rabbits. On occasion, eggshells make an appearance in the scene. As usual, her little guys and gals are having all kinds of fun for themselves.

Of the more than 350 sets done by H. B. Griggs for L. & E. Co., several of the six- or twelve-card groups had Easter themes. These include series numbers 2271, 2254, 2270 and 7026. Scenes run the gamut from sunsets and churches, with birds flying about, to children playing with one another or with various animals and lovely young ladies amidst lilies. Griggs, whose first and middle names we still do not know, or even if we are talking about a man or woman, was most likely a full time artist on the Leubrie & Elkus Co. (L. & E.) payroll. A huge number of cards by Griggs were printed, but by only that one publishing house. Our mysterious artist was a member of a very select circle: full time employees of a postcard publisher.

But far and away the most dominating personality in the Easter greeting postcard field was Ellen H. Clapsaddle. She was arguably the most successful commercial artist of her day, if not of the whole 20th century. In all, Clapsaddle did about 202 Easter postcards for International Art Publ. Co., her longtime employer. She also did 125 for Wolf Bros., a subsidiary of International Art. Some were duplicate illustrations with different verses, others had minor variations. But it can be said that Ellen Clapsaddle created more than 200 distinctly different illustrations for the Easter season from 1908 to 1914.

Gene Carr, a comic strip artist who moonlighted for a few postcard publishers in New York City, gave us one Easter card, part of his Series No. 2004 for Bergman Co.

Rose Clark, mostly known for her teddy bear artwork for Rotograph Co., also did some comic sets for Raphael Tuck & Sons, the London-based firm which operated a very busy and successful branch in New York City from the 1890s to the advent of World War I. One was "In Chickenland," Oilette series No.36. A large number of these have "Easter Greetings" and other holiday captions added on for sale as Easter greeting cards. This was a much used technique by British and American publishers - and Tuck was one of its major practitioners. In such ways was a lot of excess inventory made salable at holiday time.

Many other domestic and foreign artists, of course, did Easter subjects for the almost countless numbers of publishers doing business in this country. With a payment rate to most free lancers of about $1 to $2 for each drawing (M. E. Price, for instance, was paid $30 for sets of six by Stecher Art Litho), such extra work was certainly not a shortcut to quick wealth! But it did provide a source of supplementary income to artists and painters trying to work their way up the career ladder.

All Easter postcards of the 1902 to 1914 era were colorful, nostalgic and heart warming. Knowing the names of just some of the artists whose creative and imaginative talents gave to us, many generations later, such beauty and pleasure, helps us to appreciate them all the more.

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