Three costumed children — one in a jester's cap, two in 18th-century dress — peer at a roadside sign advertising the Home Insurance Company of New York in this delightful chromolithographed Victorian trade card, its verso printed with a calendar for July through December 1879 alongside the company's impressive financial statement: Cash Capital $3,000,000; Total Assets $6,180,873.16 as of July 1, 1878. The Home Insurance Company, founded in 1853, is historically significant as the insurer of the first skyscraper (the Home Insurance Building, Chicago, 1885) and one of the dominant American fire insurance firms of the Gilded Age. Trade cards of this type — brilliantly colored, given free to customers, and often collected in scrapbooks — are among the most charming ephemera of the 1870s–1890s. The lithography, attributed to "Ingram & Londen" (printed faintly on verso), shows careful color registration in the children's clothing: a red-and-blue frock, a gold-and-blue colonial coat. Though technically a trade card rather than a picture postcard, it is postcard-sized and collected in the same market. The card advertises agents "in all the principal towns and cities in the United States."