I saw the title of the drawings under frame on the auction table before I figured out exactly what they were. The title was pretty comical in this 21st-century era, but I found it intriguing enough to check it out.
“The Greatest Moments of a Girl’s Life,” the title boasted. The moments were a series of turn-of the-20th-century drawings of what a woman’s life was supposed to be. They centered on her finding a man, getting a proposal from him, planning her wedding, marrying him and then raising a family with him.
How much things have changed and how little. Many of us women still believe that’s what we’re all about, but just as many of us know that life holds and offers so much more.
The drawings were arranged sequentially, a road map of the life that society had laid out for women – in this case, upper-class white women (and men). They were published by a company called Reinthal & Newman of New York. There was no date on the drawings.
These were actually framed postcards, I learned later, created by artist Harrison Fisher, who produced them around 1911. Fisher was well known for his illustrations of beautiful white women who became known as “Fisher Girls” – “the epitome of feminine beauty … lithe, elegant and beautiful but also athletic, independent, and intelligent,” as americanillustration.org described them in a biography of the artist. His women supplanted the Charles Dana Gibson “Gibson Girl,” who was considered the symbol of American beauty at the turn of the 20th century.
“The average wage for a woman was approximately $5 per week, while the girls portrayed by Fisher were living a life of luxury at mansions in Newport, playing tennis or traveling with ‘our motoring millionaires’ between country clubs,” according to americanillustration.org.
Fisher was born in Brooklyn, NY, into an artistic family, and his own talents were showing by the time he was 6 years old. When he was a teenager, he sold his illustrations to a local newspaper, and later went to San Francisco to work as a staff artist at newspapers there. Back in New York, his career blossomed, and he began doing illustrations for Cosmopolitan (he produced most of its covers), Ladies Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Scribners and Life.
Along with postcards, he also did illustrations for calendars, ads (for soap and corsets), bookmarks and trinket boxes. A 1912 entry in American Stationer magazine included photos of his “Greatest Moments” postcards, which were produced by Charles Scribner & Sons, for whom Fisher illustrated.
Fisher died in 1934, but he and others didn’t consider his illustrations of much value, because as the New York Herald Tribune noted, they had already been bought and published. At Fisher’s request, a relative kept a few of his works and burned 900 of them, according to the americanillustration.org website.
Fisher was also a fine artist. His 1927 crayon-and-paint drawings of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda are in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian.
Fisher’s framed postcards have been hanging around for a while because I found several bloggers who mentioned them. Some writers compared them to their own lives (they don’t jibe), and readers of the blogs remembered them hanging in a mom or grandmom’s home when they were children.
You can also find plenty of them for sale on the web – as individual postcards or framed – from eBay to retail sites to auctions. A framed lot of the six plus a single frame of the wedding sold for $40 at an auction last year. A retail site was selling the six-framed for $150. A six-framed sold at a Goodwill online this year for $22, and six single postcards sold recently on eBay for a high of $35. So, the price is all over the place.
Fisher’s moments are apparently inspiring. A quilter liked the images so much that she decided to sew them into a 5 x 5 3/4-foot quilt. Linda Pool said she was moved to do so after her mother-in-law gave her a framed set of postcards. She called it “painting with fabric,” and added some lace, leather, jewelry and other materials to accentuate it.
i have two sets of these 6 postcards frames. The first one came from my mother-in-law – she died in 2008 at age 98 and she got the picture from her aunt josephine. the frame was put together with wooden nails and i was advised at one time by a framer to have it insured, but i don’t know where to take the picture to for appraisal. The second set was one that i bought off of ebay when i did not think i would ever get the first one due to an unfriendly sister-in-law, so i found my own set and bought it for $100. the frame on my second one more fancy but not in the best condition, but the post cards are originals in both of them. i would like to know their value and if i should be adding them to my homeowners policy.
Hi Anna. I got a email similar to yours from another reader asking about the value of her four “Greatest Moments” postcards. I answered her in a follow-up blog post, which you can read here: https://myauctionfinds.com/staging1/2013/12/20/reader-asks-about-harrison-fishers-girls-life/
I found that the prices paid for the postcards as a series or singly were all over the place. Two years ago when I checked, the six framed postcards sold for $5 to $100 on eBay. Retail sites usually seek a higher asking price. I would suggest that you check the “Advanced Search” on eBay and check “Completed listings.” There, you will find what folks are paying for them now.