Antique & Vintage Postcards

Five gilded rooms spring to life on this jewel-toned 1898 lithographic multiview from Herrenchiemsee, the island palace King Ludwig II of Bavaria built as his own Versailles — sent by a traveller named Adele (inferred from closing) all the way across the Atlantic to a young man named Joe at 5 Fair Street, New Bedford, Massachusetts. The card displays five ornate interiors: the Paradebett (state bedroom), the Ovaler Saal (Porzellanzimmer — oval porcelain room), the Paradezimmer (parade chamber), the Spiegelgallerie (Hall of Mirrors), and the Berathungszimmer (council chamber), each rendered in warm chromolithographic tones of gold, ivory, and crimson. The "Gruss aus" (Greetings from) format was at its height in the 1890s, and this example is a particularly fine specimen with intact rose-garland borders and crisp vignette frames. Two Bavarian coat-of-arms stamps — a 5 Pfennig green and a 10 Pfennig rose — frank the undivided back, which bears a legible Bavarian postmark dated in the mid-1890s and a New Bedford, NY receiving cancel of AUG 1898, making this a genuinely travelled transatlantic piece with strong philatelic and topographic appeal.