Antique & Vintage Postcards

Rendered entirely by hand in delicate gouache or watercolor, this extraordinary one-of-a-kind artist postcard shows the small hospital — "Spital von Schrems" — nestled against a dark pine forest in the Lower Austrian market town of Schrems, Waldviertel. The cream-yellow building with its terracotta roof and ventilation cellar grilles glows warmly against the deep greens of the surrounding woodland, a path curving invitingly past a garden of yellow wildflowers toward the right. This is not a printed card: every blade of grass, every window mullion, every chimney pot was applied by brush directly onto postcard stock by an artist who signed the work on the front face. Schrems, a quiet textile and glassmaking town near the Bohemian border, would have had few such artistic souvenirs, making this miniature painting a genuinely rare survival of personal creative expression on postal ephemera from the late Habsburg or early First-Republic era.