Welcome to my blog, featuring various pieces from my collection of Oz books, artwork and memorabilia!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Kindergarten Shoes

A couple days ago, in the comments on the Mother Goose plates I pictured, there was a question about a series of postcards for Kindergarten Shoes. I had never heard of these cards, but did some searching on the web and turned up an image of one (shown at right) - it's very interesting.

This is clearly based on the W. W. Denslow image from Mother Goose, but I don't think it is a Denslow card. There is a signature of F. F. beneath the verse, which I would assume is the artist's signature. Also, the drawing just doesn't show quite the same level of skill as the Denslow. My personal thought is that if a card was going to be issued, it would use the same image as the book - of course, I could be completely wrong!


I was glad to have these cards pointed out - it's always fun to see something new. This does help to reinforce how popular Denslow's work was at the time - he spawned many imitators.

Denslow did do a number of postcards - I only have one, which I've pictured, from his Thanksgiving Humor series.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting... Personally I think I would still call these cards "Denslow" cards.

It seems misleading to call them done by a "Denslow imitator" since they are basically just a mirror-image tracing by some Kindergarten Shoes lithography hack.

I've seen books and cards where the artist seems to be clearly modeling their style on Denslow's. But this is simply adapting a Denslow image to knew purposes via tracing and shifting elements, etc.

Now whether they were officially licensed or ripped off is another question - either is still possible. There is a lot of fairly wretched MGM WIZARD stuff that is badly drawn, badly reproduced, etc.

I don't recall if the Denslow account book in the Hollister collection goes up to the MOTHER GOOSE period.