Christmas

The visual culture of Christmas as we know it is largely a Victorian invention. The celebration of midwinter with evergreen decoration, gift-giving and family gathering has older roots, but it was the nineteenth century that consolidated these traditions into the specific iconography — the decorated tree, Father Christmas in his red coat, the robin on the snow-covered branch, the candlelit church — that remains dominant today. The prints produced through this formative period are not merely seasonal decorations but historical documents of a cultural transformation that reshaped how much of the world marks the turning of the year.

The Christmas card, invented by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Calcott Horsley in 1843, was the catalyst for an explosion of Christmas imagery that the developing print industry was perfectly placed to serve. Chromolithography — the colour printing process that had been developing since the 1830s and would reach its full commercial potential by the 1860s — made it possible to produce images of considerable decorative quality at prices accessible to a mass market. The great printing firms of London, Leipzig and New York competed to supply the demand, and the designs they produced drew on the full range of seasonal imagery: sacred scenes of the Nativity alongside secular images of winter revelry, children at play in the snow, domestic interiors lit by firelight and candle.

The illustrated annuals and Christmas numbers of the great Victorian periodicals — The Graphic, The Illustrated London News, Punch — were another major vehicle for seasonal imagery. The Christmas supplements of these publications commissioned their best artists and illustrators to produce images that went beyond routine journalism into something more considered and more lasting. The prints that survive from these supplements — sometimes extracted from bound volumes, sometimes preserved as issued — represent the finest popular illustration of the period applied to the specific traditions of Christmas.

Father Christmas — or Santa Claus, the American version of the Dutch Sinterklaas transmitted through Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore’s poem — evolved visually through the nineteenth century from a variety of local traditions into something approaching a universal figure. The process of standardisation is visible in the prints of the period: the figure changes in costume, weight and character across the decades, and tracing these changes through the illustrative record is one of the pleasures of collecting in this area.

Religious Christmas imagery — Nativity scenes, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt — has a much longer history than the secular tradition, and antique prints of sacred Christmas subjects span the full range of European printmaking from the fifteenth century onwards. The great religious printmakers of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries produced Nativity scenes of extraordinary refinement, and these works occupy a different register from the popular imagery of the Victorian Christmas — more demanding, more serious, but no less visually compelling.

For collectors, antique Christmas prints offer material that combines genuine historical interest with strong decorative appeal and obvious seasonal relevance. Whether the interest is in the development of a specific icon, the history of chromolithography, the illustrated periodical tradition, or simply the pleasure of seasonal imagery of real quality, this is a field with considerable variety and consistent appeal.