Art Needn’t Be Big: A Love Letter to Old Postcards

There's something special about holding an old picture postcard in your hand. The edges have gone soft, a corner is missing, the paper has yellowed, the colours have faded. And perhaps it carries the handwriting of someone who, more than a hundred years ago, wrote a few lines to family or friends.

The past becomes tangible.

When I was a child – back in the dark ages, that is, the pre-smartphone era – picture postcards were our social media. They showed famous buildings, picturesque landscapes, street scenes or works of art, and brought a piece of the world into your letterbox.

Looking at old picture postcards today, they offer a glimpse into the life of their time, and into the way people saw the world around them.

A Box Full of Memories

I have to admit, I have a soft spot for picture postcards. Even if you can send holiday greetings so much faster these days. Any amateur can take wonderful pictures with a smartphone; the colours are far more vivid – but in the end it's just a mass of photos on your phone. Or is it only me?

I hardly ever look at the pictures on my phone, maybe right after the holiday, but after that? And even when I do, there are so many of them that they often leave me cold.

But leafing through an old photo album, or digging out the box with all the picture postcards I've been sent and collected over the years – that's a nostalgic afternoon every single time. There are postcards from my sons' school trips, an unexpected and all the more delightful hello from a friend, handwriting I recognise on a picture of a place I've never been. And sometimes they're holiday greetings from acquaintances I've all but forgotten.

And then there are the picture postcards I've bought and collected myself. From almost every museum I visit, I take one with me. It holds on to the whole day: the picture I stood in front of the longest and the mood I carried back out with me.

Mood, actually – that's often the thing. Quite often it isn't the subject that matters to me. Sometimes it's just a detail that catches me, a colour, the calm or the liveliness of it. I like to put these together into a kind of mood board when I'm working on an art series. Not templates, but a source of inspiration. Or a kind of collage of feelings, a way to make my emotions visible and translate them into my art later on.

The lovely thing about picture postcards is that they're so expressive and yet so small. They're easy to tuck away, to swap around, to combine anew. And eventually they find their way back into the box – my little treasure chest – waiting to be rediscovered by me on some afternoon, a cup of tea in hand.

The World's Oldest Postcard Was a Joke

The very first picture postcard was sent about 30 years before it was invented. It arrived on 14 July 1840 at a house in Fulham, London. The writer Theodore Hook had painted it by hand and sent it to himself.

1840 was the year of the great postal reform in England. Before then, in Britain – as pretty much everywhere else in the world – it wasn't the sender who paid, but the recipient. Who could also simply refuse to accept it. The price depended on the distance and on the number of sheets.

For a labourer, a single letter could cost more than a day's wages. The whole system was seen as expensive, slow and badly run. It was also unfair. Members of Parliament and the nobility were allowed to send post for free, and this privilege was hugely abused, with people franking letters for friends and family too.

Rowland Hill, a schoolteacher, showed in his 1837 pamphlet ‘Post Office Reform' that distance had almost nothing to do with the actual cost. The real effort came from having to deliver unpaid letters one by one and collect the money on the doorstep. He proposed a flat rate of one penny, paid in advance by the sender, no matter how far.

On 10 January 1840 came the ‘Uniform Penny Post'; franking was abolished, even the Queen's. In May came the ‘Penny Black', the first postage stamp in public use. It was actually only meant as an alternative. The English Post Office's main idea was the ‘Mulready stationery' – prepaid envelopes and lettersheets with an elaborate design by the artist William Mulready. These didn't go down particularly well. The stamp, however, was a roaring success. The number of paid letters rose from around 76 million (1839) to nearly 350 million by 1850.

The card Hook painted shows postal clerks hunched around an oversized inkwell – the very picture of scribes drowning in the old, cumbersome paperwork. Working out every item by hand, by sheets and by miles, noting it down, collecting the money.

Hook was a notorious prankster, known for elaborate stunts like the Berners Street Hoax. The card was a little joke aimed squarely at the postal clerks – the very people through whose hands it would pass on its way to him.

For 160 years no one gave the card a thought. Only in 2001 did a postal historian discover it in a stamp collection: the oldest picture postcard in the world! In 2002 it sold for £31,758.75 – a record. Because officially, the postcard wasn't invented until the late 1860s, in Austria. What's more, it's the only known postcard franked with a ‘Penny Black'. After all, the postcard wasn't introduced in Britain until 1870 – by which time the ‘Penny Black' was long gone.

Too Improper for the Post

Whether Hook's little painted card had anything to do with the birth of the postcard idea can no longer be traced today. Perhaps it even emerged in several places around the world at once, simply out of necessity and the will to reform the postal system. In the German-speaking world, at least, and as far as we can prove today, it was the Prussian postal official Heinrich von Stephan who first had the idea of the postcard.

Back then still as the ‘open post sheet': a card without an envelope, for short messages, at a uniform, low rate. His thinking behind it: writing had grown ever simpler, from the wax tablet to the parchment scroll to the folded letter; the letter had by now become too cumbersome and at the same time too long, because convention forbade you from confining yourself to the bare message. A card would set you free from all that.

In the spring of 1865 he put the idea to his superior, Postmaster General von Philipsborn. Who found it improper. Where would privacy be, if anyone could read along?! That he also feared falling revenues surely played only a minor part.

Six months later, the 5th Conference of the German Postal Union was held in Karlsruhe. Heinrich von Stephan wasn't allowed to present his idea officially, so he handed out a memorandum on the subject on the sidelines of the conference. The time wasn't yet ripe – but the idea was now out in the world.

Four years later, the Viennese economist Emanuel Herrmann laid out the idea in a newspaper article. Being an economist, he did the sums: the card would pay off despite the halved postage, because the sheer volume of post was bound to rise enormously. And suddenly the notion of a postcard didn't seem quite so unthinkable after all.

Herrmann, by the way, wanted to limit each card to twenty words – until someone asked the obvious question: who was going to count them?

On 1 October 1869 the Austro-Hungarian post issued the first ‘Correspondence Card'. It cost two Kreuzer, half the price of a letter. The old worry about the open card was printed right onto it: no responsibility would be taken for the content of the messages.

The very first card travelled that same day from Perg to nearby Kirchdorf, to arrange a visit. Then the numbers exploded. In the final three months of 1869 alone, three million cards were sold. No guardian of morals could stand against that. Germany followed within the year.

That was no doubt helped by the fact that, on 26 April 1870, Heinrich von Stephan himself became Postmaster General of the North German Confederation – and introduced the postcard there.

Bismarck signed off on the decree in June 1870, and on the first day of sale in Berlin, 25 June 1870, more than 45,000 cards went over the counter. Von Stephan's once-‘improper' proposal had won.

When Pictures Learned to Travel

The early card carried no picture yet. There were exceptions, like the one from August Schwartz, a court bookseller and printer in Oldenburg, who in 1870 printed the image of an artilleryman onto a postcard and sent it to a relative in Magdeburg. Whether the little picture was really there from the start or was only added later is still doubted to this day. Either way, such cases remained the exception.

Like the very first card, which went from Perg to the neighbouring village of Kirchdorf to arrange a visit, the postcard was a tool for short, practical messages. There was simply no reason for a picture.

At the start of the 19th century, the railway had been invented in England. By the middle of the century, many countries on the European continent followed suit, among them Austria and Germany. Intended at first for trade and industry, it also made travel for people far cheaper – and the world thereby a little smaller.

In 1843 Heinrich Heine wrote that the railway was killing space, and that only time was left to us. He described feeling as though the mountains and forests of every land were advancing on Paris.

When, towards the end of the 19th century, the labour movement won shorter working weeks and work-free Sundays and holidays, ordinary workers too had the chance, for the first time ever, of a Sunday outing. Thanks to the railway, travel was fast and cheap – and now there was time for it as well.

Suddenly, it wasn't only the aristocracy heading to the seaside or the mountains, but the middle classes too. Spa towns and beauty spots flourished the moment they were connected to the railway network. For the first time in history, larger parts of the population had something like a holiday – that is, a place where they were and their friends were not.

Out of this grew a new need. Anyone who travelled wanted not only to send greetings, not just 'It's lovely here', but also ‘I was here.' A card from the spa town was a small piece of social proof. Travel was new, and the fact that you could afford it was allowed to arrive back home.

But you hadn't taken the photo of the place yourself. Cameras were expensive and rare. So the picture had to be bought ready-made. This is where the picture postcard came in: it was the first way to show those back home a place where you happened to be.

It's no coincidence, then, that the earliest picture postcards show almost exclusively places of interest to tourists: landmarks, viewpoints, spa houses, and mountain peaks. The ‘Greetings from …' cards, as we still call them today.

The early views were coloured in by hand, until the Photochrom process was developed in Zurich, which allowed a black-and-white negative to be printed in colour across several stones.

The postcard was invented because writing was meant to become simpler. It became the picture postcard because people began to travel – and had something to convey for which words weren't enough.

Collector's Fever: Picture Postcards as Documents of Their Time

Picture postcards were so popular that they became collectibles almost at once. As early as 1886, the magazine ‘Der Postkartensammler' appeared in Leipzig. Around the turn of the century, a lavish collector's album belonged in almost every household. With the ‘Card Collector's March', the picture postcard even found its way into music, and at the Paris carnival procession of 1905 there was a float of its own dedicated to postcard fever.

Deltiology, as the collecting of postcards is known among specialists, holds the appeal of the inexhaustible. A collection is never finished. Almost every place, however small, has its own picture postcards, often hundreds of different designs. And because new cards are still being made to this day, you can trace the development of a place through them.

Often a historical picture postcard is the only visual record of how a particular street, an inn or a railway station looked a hundred years ago. Many buildings destroyed in the Second World War exist today only as an image on a picture postcard.

Collectors usually specialise in a particular field, whether it's individual places, themes and motifs, printing processes or individual artists. Sometimes it's even the text. Collectors of field post or wartime cards pay attention to what's written. Whatever the field, it's nearly always about grasping history not only as historical development, but also as the personal experience of individuals.

Take the one from Jim Walsh of Toowoomba, Queensland. A man from the other side of the world, building trenches and roads in Flanders. He sent a silk card embroidered with ‘Good Luck', made in Paris, home to his aunt.

He was ‘still alive & kicking', he wrote. Then he wrote about the weather. It rained a lot here. He supposed it would clear up eventually.

At Ypres, the Third Battle of Flanders was entering its third month. Endless rain had turned the landscape into a sea of mud. Shellfire had destroyed the drainage ditches, and men drowned in the craters. Jim Walsh mentioned the rain in passing, the way one makes small talk about the weather. On an open card that anyone could read, with a censor at your back and an aunt on the other side of the world who worries – you don't write how it really is. You write that it's raining.

Jim Walsh never came home; he fell on 21 October 1917 at Ypres.

Speaking of not writing how it really is. The British Army provided its soldiers with free field postcards. The postage was prepaid and they were given priority in delivery. Soldiers received two a week and were encouraged to use them instead of letters. But you traded your own words for the certainty that they'd arrive.

Because on the back there were only pre-printed sentences: I am quite well. I have been admitted into hospital – sick / wounded – and am going on well. I hope to be discharged soon. I am being sent down to the base.

The soldier crossed out whatever didn't apply. Date, signature, done.

Above it, in bold and underlined: If anything else is added, the card will be destroyed. Only the date and the signature were allowed. Not a word. Not one.

Because nothing individual was on them, the cards passed quickly through the censors. In a single week in 1916, 677,450 postcards from soldiers abroad arrived in Britain. To hold the card in your hands meant: he's alive.

Three days ago, at least.

Sometimes the card is the last thing left of a journey.

Queenstown in Ireland (renamed Cobh in 1920) was the last port from which post left the Titanic, which is why these cards often bear the postmark of 11 April 1912 – three days before she sank.

The maid Sarah Daniels wrote to a friend on board: ‘I wish you were here, it is a lovely boat.' She survived. The first-class passenger Richard William Smith wrote that he was ‘just leaving for the land of stars and stripes'. He was not among the survivors. His card sold in 2024 for over 25,000 dollars.

After the Titanic struck the iceberg, the mail room was one of the first to flood. The Titanic's postal clerks died trying to save the mailbags.

With historical picture postcards, you see, it isn't only about a picture. It's the emotions and the stories that the cards carry onwards.

Art That Never Meant to Be

The picture postcard was never meant to be art. It was supposed to be small, cheap and quick. A makeshift for anyone with no time for a letter. It was invented in order to leave things out.
Just a few small pictures that someone had sent to someone else.

Today they lie in archives. The Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin holds more than 200,000 of them, and the University of Osnabrück maintains an archive of its own devoted to historical picture postcards. What was once too improper for the post now rests behind glass and is studied.

What's studied is what moved people, what mattered to them, what made them laugh, whom they admired and whom they despised. Historians, art historians, scholars of German, musicologists and textile researchers read the same cards, each in their own way.

And so picture postcards do what art does: they touch us. And sometimes all it takes is a piece of paper that fits in the palm of your hand.