People postcards for sale cover studio portraits, family groups, wedding parties and everyday social occasions, mostly dating from the late Victorian era through to the mid-20th century.
Most of the people pictured are unnamed now, their identities long since separated from the card itself, yet there is something that holds attention in a photograph of someone dressed in their best, sitting still for the camera on a day that clearly mattered to them. A stranger's wedding day, a family gathered for the one photograph they might have taken that year, a child in a sailor suit propped against a studio prop, all kept because somebody once thought the moment was worth keeping.
Studio portraits make up a large part of this collection. Local photographers used painted backdrops, plain drapes and the occasional prop chair or aspidistra plant, and printed the result directly onto postcard-backed photographic paper, a format known as a real photographic postcard. This became common practice from the early 1900s, replacing the older cabinet card as the standard way for a studio to hand over a customer's portrait. Every now and then a card turns up showing a named public figure or performer of the day rather than an anonymous sitter, occasionally signed, though that's the exception among a collection that's mostly made up of unidentified faces.
Family and occasion postcards form the other main strand, including group portraits, wedding photographs and children's portraits, along with the occasional occupational image showing someone in their work clothes or uniform of trade. Clothing, hairstyles and studio props are often a better guide to the decade than anything written on the card.
This collection sits alongside our comical and military postcards as another way people appear in vintage postcards, and we add new stock regularly.
