A Woman and Her Bird

One thing I find interesting to look for is various different usages of the same “mortised stock cut”. Stock cuts were designs on type-high metal sold by type foundries such as MacKellar Smiths and Jordan of Philadelphia; “mortised” refers to an area left blank where individual printers would insert the information for each client wanting to use the stock cut. Many such cuts eventually showed up on all sorts of printed items, usually printed by letterpress or lithography in one color, or a rubber stamp impression in one color. It is very unusual to find any of them printed in multi-color, which required somebody . . . most likely the individual printing firm and not the foundry . . . to make individual separate plates for each color used, which was time-consuming and considerably expensive.

The girl-with-birdcage design (below) can be found on a very wide variety of items.

Printed on trade cards . . .

Printed on the back of a carte de visite . . .

Printed on the back of a carte de visite . . .

Rubber-stamped on the back of a tintype . . .

Rubber stamped on the backs of cartes de visite . . .

Printed in gold-on-black of the back of a carte de visite . . .

Printed on a handbill . . .

Rubber stamped on the back of a cabinet card . . .

Two different, very scarce examples of the image printed in multi/full color, one a wood engraving and the other a chromolithograph . . .

The girl (or woman)-with-bird-in-cage motif was universally popular in the Victorian era simply because the keeping of bird was culturally in vogue at that time.

Related images were everywhere . . .