Valentine card: P.14407-R

Titles

Valentine card

Maker(s)

Publisher: Mansell, Joseph

Entities

• Valentine card

Categories

• Print

Description

A small card (just slightly larger than 64mo) of embossed and lace-paper designed as an envelope where a cut-paper male hand places a ring on the finger of a cut-paper female hand. When these are pulled apart, the 'envelope' opens to reveal an embossed and die-cut card with gilded detail and hand-coloured cut-paper flowers and foliage with a central lithographed image in blue ink of a broken blue and white Wedgewood 'wiillow pattern' plate with verse printed above and below: "To shew our esteem for your merits so great, / We present you dear sir with a small piece of plate.". MANSELL stamped on verso. This card almost certainly relates to a sheet of headed notepaper printed with the name and address of the Actons of Brighton, a dealer from whom Glaisher purchased ceramics and which is affixed to the album leaf opposite. See P.14411-R-49. In fact, the arrival from Actons of this 'Wedgewood' valentine and a valentine on the subject of crinolines is documented in a letter from Glaisher to Miss Catherine Parsons: 'The enclosed came this morning & explain themselves. They seem to me worth having. Though the Wedgewood one does not much impress me, I like the crinoline one. ... I am sending the valentines by the 4 o'clock OM [Omnibus]. I will write & tell Miss Acton I am sending them to you to see.'. Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 910-1985, 6 December, 1924, letter to Miss Catherine Parsons.This card was included in the exhibition of valentine cards, _For ever thine: the nineteenth century valentine_, held in the Charrington Print Room at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1995, no. 56.

Legal notes

Bequeathed by Dr J. W. L. Glaisher, 1928