When you consider that chocolates and flowers are the most frequently chosen Valentine gifts, it’s a little surprising that a whole collecting field dedicated to this theme exists. After all, chocolates and flowers don’t last long, so what is there on the vintage and antique front to collect?
The most obvious answer is Valentine’s cards, which date back to the 1600s at least.
At the time these were almost always handmade.
The Museum of London has a collection of more than 1700 Valentine’s cards, but the oldest known printed examples, dating to 1797, can be found in York Castle Museum. Hand-painted and pierced to produce a lace effect, it is decorated with cupids, doves and flowers.
The printer was John Fairburn, of 146, Minories, London, and it was printed with a month to spare on January 12.
Printed around the swags of flowers that frame the design are the words:
Since on this ever Happy day,
All Nature’s full of Love and Play
Yet harmless still if my design,
’Tis but to be your Valentine.
It captures a moment in time from the devoted Catherine Mossday, writing to the intriguingly anonymous Mr Brown of Dover Place, Kent, Road, London.
The rather frustrated Miss Mossday tells her intended:
As I have repeatedly requested you to come I think you must have some reason for not complying with my request, but as I have something particular to say to you I could wish you make it all agreeable to come on Sunday next without fail and in doing you will oblige your well wisher.
Half a century on from Miss Mossday’s plaintive missive, by mid Victorian times, the Valentine industry in Britain was so huge that it is thought the public spent hundreds of millions of pounds a year on cards and gifts for their loved ones. Today it is well over £1.5 billion in the UK and around $15 billion in the United States – equivalent to around a quarter of the sales for the entire global art market in a year!
Elaborate cards decorated with lace and ribbons – and even some with moving parts – demanded a considerable outlay on the part of the purchaser. Most popular were the ‘marionette’ cards, with their paper dolls with moving limbs, created by Raphael Tuck, who worked under Royal Warrant.
Celebrated artists and illustrators of the day were drafted in to create designs which collectors seek out now, among them children’s author Kate Greenaway.
