From Views.PC.Cooke

Catherine Cooke collected hundreds of postcards from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Made to portray a certain destination or celebrate a particular occasion, postcards chimed with Cooke’s interest in architecture and design. Most of the cards shown here have been used, and the messages from lives lived long ago add further interest to the researcher.

The first four (starting with the top postcard and then going down in left-to-right pairs) are pre-Soviet greetings cards from specific locations: Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Crimea. The last of these is the first to reproduce photographs, and this is followed by a Soviet photographic postcard of Leningrad’s Narva Gate. Leaving the precision of photographs behind, the penultimate pair of postcards are reproductions of paintings. They show the village of Poduzhem’e and a historical representation of the old Winter Palace, by Ivan Bilibin and Evgenii Lansere respectively.

The group ends with a pair of postcards both designed specifically to celebrate New Year, yet worlds apart. On the left is a flowery card, dating from about 1910, which speaks of prosperity and peace. Its companion on the right, on the other hand, sends greetings from the Eastern Front of the World War Two.