Antique & Vintage Postcards

Workers in white cotton bend and strain beneath the lance of a mounted Spanish conquistador, their bodies rendered in Diego Rivera's signature monumental style — flat, powerful, and simmering with the weight of colonial labor — this is a detail from the celebrated fresco cycle Rivera painted 1929–1930 on the walls of the Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca, commissioned by U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow in a remarkable act of cross-border patronage. The scene, titled Cortando la Caña (Cutting Sugar Cane), captures the brutal economics of the hacienda system with Rivera's characteristic earthy palette of green cane rows, warm ochre, and terra-cotta flesh tones. Published by the Fischgrund Publishing Co. of Mexico City and printed in Mexico, this card dates from the 1940s–1950s and bears the printed facsimile of Rivera's name on the reverse — a common authentication device used by Fischgrund on their art reproduction series.