Fruit Sellers
A gorgeously coloured collotype with the anonymous note on the front: "They are nearly as nice as ruby lips. best."
A gorgeously coloured collotype with the anonymous note on the front: "They are nearly as nice as ruby lips. best."
A rare Tuck's "Real Photograph" postcard of India, which they seem to have offered in response to the market around the 1930s. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz describes the scene in 1951 when he first approached Bombay by ship:
"An arch of stone
Among the earliest postcards of Bombay from a photograph. One can see the title and photographer inscribed at the bottom of the original glass negative, and the hand-tinting is done in large blocks.
Knife grinders are a vanishing craft. Doing this at home before electric knife sharpeners was difficult. Knife grinders would take their sharpening wheels from door to door and take care of the problem.
An earlier postcard view, before divided backs
One can see the rapid transformation of the postcard from a time when messages where only allowed on the front, as in this card.
Clifton & Co., the first big Bobby-based publisher had numerous versions of this card. This keyhole-style view – a briefly popular postcard type – works well with the curve of what is now Marine Drive opening out towards the waters of Back Bay.
As competition among postcard publishers intensified between 1905 and 1910, each tried to outdo the other with new formats offered by the German printers who served much of the Indian market.
Around the turn of the century, women of Bombay were on the cutting-edge of popular fashion, photographed in studio settings like this one and extensively postcarded.
The Mexican Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz has a nice description of coming upon the Taj Mohal Hotel by ship for the first time in the early 1950s: "Behind the monument [India Gate], floating in the warm air, was a silhouette of the Taj Mahal
A lithographic portrait, which by this time had become a lesser used printing process for postcards.