Victorian Washes

One of my great pleasures in collecting antique advertising is to find duplicates within lesser known genres. Today I'm sharing examples of a subset of trade cards known as "washes." These all would have been printed between approximately 1870 and 1890.

Washes were almost always die cut (I've never seen one that wasn't), and they were usually red, yellow and green, in that order.

That's because printers created the color spectrum by hand, as shown above, and those three colors would blend into a particularly pleasing spectrum. Most trade cards from the same period were colored through the registration of many lithographed stone plates, so the wash method of colorization was a quick and inexpensive way to achieve "full color."

Most often, the wash die cuts would be leaves, which seemed to go hand-in-hand with the favored spectrum.

This distinctive card reads:

CENTENNIAL SALOON

AUGUST MAYER, Propietor,

For Pure Whiskies and Wines for Medical

Use Call on Him at

20 Main St. : : : CRAWFORDSVILLE

The Monarch Livermore Pen, on sale for $3.50, would have been pretty pricey. According to immigrationwatchcanada.org, a skilled laborer of the 1880s would have earned $2.00-$2.50 for a day's work.
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