Antique & Vintage Postcards

Posted from Baltimore in July 1929, this linen-era card reproduces H.O. Walker's luminous lunette mural "Lyric Poetry" from the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress — a swirling allegory of the Muse, laurel-crowned and lyre-struck at center, attended by draped and semi-nude figures representing Passion, Beauty, Mirth, Pathos, Truth, and Devotion amid a wooded glade and cascading stream, all framed within the building's richly gilded mosaic arch. The sender, who signs only initials "S.P.S.," tells a Mr. Bernard in Port Huron, Michigan, simply: "We are leaving Tuesday morning for Cleveland — how is everything." A breezy interwar travel note affixed to one of America's grandest civic art treasures.