Antique & Vintage Postcards

Ivy clings thickly to the warm limestone walls of Taunton School in this atmospheric Edwardian halftone postcard — the Gothic Revival chapel at right with its soaring tracery window, the central clock tower anchoring a facade that seems to belong as much to Oxford as to Somerset, the whole scene captured across an open playing field under a pale English sky. Founded in 1847 as a Nonconformist institution, Taunton School had by the turn of the twentieth century grown into one of England's notable independent schools, and this card — printed at the celebrated Stengel & Co. works in Dresden and published from their London office at 39 Redcross Street — represents the pinnacle of Edwardian postcard printing quality, its fine halftone screen still crisp after more than a century. The undivided back, with its inland/foreign stamp-rate box, places this firmly in the pre-1902 to circa 1904 window.