Fridays at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources to help them determine the value of their items. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but I can do some preliminary research to get them started. So, these are market values based on prices I find on the web, not appraisal for insurance purposes that I suggest for items that have been determined to be of great value.
Today’s question is about a group of wedding party postcards by C.H. Twelvetrees.
Question:
I have a framed picture of all six postcards of the wedding party. Would you know the value?
Answer:
The reader had come across a blog post I wrote several years ago about a group of six postcards of members of a wedding party. I had earlier seen their likenesses in a copy of Pictorial Review magazine from around 1910 or 1920.
The images were sweetly drawn by C.H. Twelvetrees, with each person in the card described as such:
The Mother in Law (But a Very Nice One).
The Groom (God Help Him).
The Bride (God Bless Her).
The Minister (Solemn and Workmanlike).
The Best Man (No Wedding Bells for Him).
The Bridesmaid (Sweet as Peachblossom).
When I went searching for C.H. Twelvetrees or Charles H. Twelvetrees, the name Charles R. Twelvetrees kept coming up.
Charles H. seemed to have been born in 1888 and died in 1948, according to several websites. He was an illustrator and artist, and designed magazine covers, postcards, jigsaw puzzles, original prints and more. His works were signed either C. Twelvetrees or Twelvetrees or C.H. Twelvetrees.
In the first decade of the 20th century, he created a comic strip with a hero duck called “Johnny Quack and the Van Cluck Twins” (some sites said it was “Van Cluck Sisters”) for the New York Herald newspaper. I found several copies of the filmstrip offered for sale on eBay, and signed C. Twelvetrees.
As for the value of the wedding party postcards, the “Sold” or “Completed Listings” on eBay are a good place to routinely check, as well as retail sites on the web. I found two of them on eBay: the Best Man sold for $3 and the Bridesmaid for about $6. I found the bride and groom on a retail site; both had been sold but the selling price was not listed.
