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| A Banker's Daughter |
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| East Lynne |
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| East Lynne |
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| Odette |
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| Eviction |
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| Patience |
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| Patience |
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| Patience |
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| The Professor |
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| The White Slave |
Commercial color lithography came to maturity in the 1880s. This group of theatrical posters preserved at the
Library of Congress all date to that decade.
But for quite different reasons than printing technology, I have always felt a special fond affinity for the 1880s. It was in college days that I noticed how many of the artists I was then obsessed with had been born in that one ten-year period. Such as
– Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Coco Chanel, Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sonia Delaunay, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Edward Hopper, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, P.G. Wodehouse, Anita Loos, Jean Cocteau, Georgia O'Keeffe (not to mention that futuristic pair of theorists, Marcel Duchamp and Ezra Pound).
Oddly enough there were also two great modernist poets who died in the 1880s
– Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson.
Subliminally, I expect this time-slot resonates with me for genealogical reasons. More than 600,000 Swedes migrated to the United States in the 1880s, and that group included the majority of my own ancestors.