{"id":37424,"date":"2019-02-14T07:30:59","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T11:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/?p=37424"},"modified":"2019-02-14T13:34:54","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T17:34:54","slug":"the-bizarre-valentine-postcards-of-r-f-outcault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/2019\/02\/the-bizarre-valentine-postcards-of-r-f-outcault\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bizarre Valentine Postcards of R.F. Outcault"},"content":{"rendered":"

By:\u00a0 Kevin Grace<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Postcard<\/a>The children are either drawn as freckle-faced street urchins or as the clean-smocked offspring of the hoity-toity.\u00a0 The animals \u2013 a parrot, typically dogs \u2013 look on quizzically or crack wise.\u00a0 And the occasion being Valentine\u2019s Day, the messages are about the lovelorn and the hopeful.\u00a0 These are the early 20th<\/sup> century postcards drawn by Richard Felton Outcault, a pioneer of the modern newspaper comic strip who gave America such literary figures as Buster Brown and The Yellow Kid.\u00a0\u00a0 And advertising being \"Richard<\/a>what it was (and is), Buster and the Kid gave us books, shoes, coin banks, calendars, clocks, pencils, puzzles, and all manner of geegaws, selling the country on the all-American pastime of buying stuff.<\/p>\n

But the postcards deviated from the overall merchandising a bit, although Outcault\u2019s newspaper employers and their agents certainly generated a lot of them.\u00a0 The holiday cards were something a little different, a reflection of the artist\u2019s own attitudes to his comic \"Postcard<\/a>creations.\u00a0 R.F. Outcault was born in 1863, hailing from Lancaster, Ohio.\u00a0 He came to Cincinnati in 1878 to attend the McMicken School of Design \u2013 which is now the Cincinnati Art Academy, though the University of Cincinnati certainly traces part of its heritage as well to the McMicken school, so in effect Outcault is a UC alumnus.\u00a0 He graduated in 1881 and began his employment as a painter of bucolic scenes in the massive safes constructed by the Hall Safe and Lock Company.\u00a0 Growing in local reputation, Outcault managed to land a job with the 1888 centennial industrial exposition in Cincinnati, one of the many local product fairs held in the 19th<\/sup> century, and which were begun as an outlet of the Ohio Mechanics Institute, founded in \"Child<\/a>1828 and now part of the University of Cincinnati\u2019s College of Engineering and Applied Science.\u00a0 At the exposition he painted scenes for Thomas Edison\u2019s electric light displays, parlaying that into a career on the east coast with trade magazines.\u00a0 Incidentally, while Edison was a telegraph operator in 1860s Cincinnati, he frequented the OMI library for his reading pleasure.<\/p>\n

By 1894, Outcault was drawing cartoons for newspapers and magazines, particularly the New \"Postcard<\/a>York World, <\/em>the New York Journal, Judge, <\/em>and the New York Herald.\u00a0 <\/em>It was during this time that he created his first famous character of his \u201cHogan\u2019s Alley\u201d cartoon, the Yellow Kid.\u00a0 By 1902, R.F. introduced his famous Buster Brown and his faithful terrier, Tige.\u00a0 And, his personal style of using panels and dialogue balloons became a standard in cartooning.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>But those strange Valentine cards?\u00a0 They are unlike the sweet and lovey-dovey kids\u2019 valentines of the late 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Instead, there is an edge to Outcault\u2019s art, a bit of an insult here and there, and more rejection than true love.\u00a0 In a way, they are an outgrowth of the so-called \u201cVinegar Valentines\u201d of Victorian America.\u00a0 Vinegar valentines \"Postcard<\/a>were sarcastic and insulting, greetings designed to reject the offers of true love.\u00a0 Competing with true romantic valentines, these little missives of misanthropy usually were sent anonymously to those one disliked, be they flirtatious bachelors or suffragists.\u00a0\u00a0 Outcault\u2019s cards resemble them in a natural progression, one supposes, from invective to just strange little takes on the whole idea of Valentine\u2019s Day.<\/p>\n

\"Postcard<\/a>For R.F. Outcault, his valentine postcards were done in his typical style and represent another aspect of what was a long and productive cartooning career.\u00a0 Retiring from the hubbub of daily newspaper work, he spent the last decade of his life quietly painting and died in 1928.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By:\u00a0 Kevin Grace The children are either drawn as freckle-faced street urchins or as the clean-smocked offspring of the hoity-toity.\u00a0 The animals \u2013 a parrot, typically dogs \u2013 look on quizzically or crack wise.\u00a0 And the occasion being Valentine\u2019s Day, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,600,31,13],"tags":[959,67,990,1528],"class_list":["post-37424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arb","category-special-collections-2","category-uc","category-uclibraries","tag-illustrators","tag-rare-books","tag-valentines-day","tag-valentines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libapps.libraries.uc.edu\/liblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}