Christmas Cards

Here we are, first of December, and I’m already introducing the subject of Christmas. I make no apologies. The fact is that I do like making my own Christmas cards, and if you’re going to do more than a few it does require a certain amount of time and a certain amount of preparation. Put it this way – by starting during this last week I’ve bought myself plenty enough time to complete enough of a stock. 

Last year I painted watercolour Christmas Cards mostly for work colleagues. There was precious little planning involved – basically the idea just occurred to me one Sunday morning.  I did it by folding pages from my watercolour pad in half and using them as cards, painting the design onto the ‘front’ cover. That was all well and good, but they did look like what they were – sheets of paper folded in half. 

This year I bought a set of 25 blank cards with envelopes from a craft supplier, and then I started doing the same thing as last year– looking out designs on google, picking what I liked, editing out what I didn’t, so on and so forth. Thing is, this time out I wasn’t at all so happy with the first four or five results. So I thought that perhaps I could play to my strengths, and make pen and ink sketch designs rather than painting. Once again, I looked on the internet to see what was what, and got cracking. 

I’m particularly fond of the work of Thomas Nast. Originally born in Germany, when Thomas was a child his father decided to move the family to the USA, and Thomas became the leading and most influential American political cartoonist of the 19^th century – and possibly of all time. In addition to his satirical cartoons, though, Thomas Nast probably did more to fix the traditional portrayal of Father Christmas/Santa Claus in the public imagination than anyone else. For over 20 years he would create new cartoon images for Harper’s Weekly every Christmas, and I’m enchanted by many of them. I’ve already copied a couple of his Santa designs – and doubtless will do more before the 25^th.

All three cards on this page have copies of details
from drawings by Thomas Nast. It's drawings
like the originals which really popularised
the public conception of the jolly Santa.

Originally I bought just one box of 25 cards, which I thought would be just about enough for work colleagues and friends in the Art group. And indeed this might have been true, had it not been for my nearest and dearest. Mrs. C. fell in love with one design and appropriated it to send to her mother and step dad in Spain. Well, fair enough, I can’t really quibble with that. Still, I must confess that it’s got me quite interested in the work of 19^th century cartoonists and illustrators like Nast, Sir John Tenniel, George Cruickshank, John Leech and others.

By way of an aside, I am actually descended from two professional artists on my mother’s side, one of whom did dabble in political cartoons, in the generation between Hogarth and James Gillray. Philip Dawe was my 5x great grandfather. In all honesty we don’t know a great deal about his personal life, but he certainly grew up and worked in London, where he was an assistant to William Hogarth in the later part of that great man’s career. Philip was an engraver as well, but he did produce some political cartoons about the political situation in the lead up to the American Revolution, showing sympathy towards the Americans. He had several children, one of whom, Henry Edward Dawe, was my 4x great grandfather. Henry is best known as an engraver, and was actually JMW Turner’s favoured engraver of prints of his work. For a time though Henry worked as assistant for his elder brother George Dawe, the real star artist of the family. George Dawe is pretty much unknown in his own country now, but over 300 of his paintings hand in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. An extremely successful portrait painter in  his day, George was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to paint portraits of over 300 victorious Russian Generals from the Napoleonic Wars. He was in Russia through most of the 1820s, but returned home to die in 1829.

It’s amazing to me that these two ancestors of mine would have known and worked with two of the English artists I most admire, Hogarth and Turner. Coming back to where we started, Hogarth was pretty much the figure from which all of the great 18^th and 19^th century cartoonists took their inspiration. 

Not based on a Nast cartoon this time,
but another nice image, which I hope
that the recipient will like