Preface —
Contents — Preface 5 Introduction 6 Arrival and Departure 7 The Steamship Lines and their Routes 8 Developments in Passenger Ship Design 9 The Passengers 11 The Messages 16 The Art Work 19
— T H E P O S TC AR D S 2 5 Steamships before 1900 26 Antonio Lopez. Tuck postcard featuring this 1900 liner of the Cia Transatlantica, built 1891, in a dramatic portrait by Justo Ruiz Luna.
Bridging the Centuries 41 1900-1910 57 The Second Decade 84 The 1920s 99 Into the 1930s 118 The 1940s 135 The Last Liners 140
— The Artists 151 Bibliography 156 References and Sources 156 Acknowledgements 157 Collecting Postcards 158 Index 159
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his book is about ships and paintings – in particular, it shows the development of the passenger liner through contemporary paintings issued as postcards. I have tried to sketch the development of the liner – its design, routes, the passengers it carried – from 1880 to about 1980, and the postcards featured here reflect some of the enormous changes that took place during this time – in technology and trade, politics, society, in design and advertising, and in art. There are already many fine books available about this period of maritime history, and so the information about shipping given in these pages serves really to set the scene for the pictures themselves. Here, the artist’s use of colour instils each scene with more
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imagination and a greater sense of atmosphere than a photograph might allow, and the result is a lively and personal view of the life and times of the great liners. Although many of the ships depicted in these pages are well documented, this is not the case with most of the artists who painted them. Comparatively few are mentioned in art directories, and when they are, information is often lacking or uncertain. It seems unjust that these artists and illustrators who recorded maritime history and have given so much pleasure by their paintings should simply be forgotten. I hope this book will rectify this omission to some extent, for I believe that many of the facts about them appear here for the first time in a publication of this nature.