Antique & Vintage Postcards

Wearing a battered tan cowboy hat and a vivid red shirt, a bearded artist grins as he touches brush to canvas outdoors beneath bare winter branches — it is Ted DeGrazia at his Tucson studio, caught mid-stroke on the luminous swirling composition that would become one of the most reproduced holiday images in American history. The painting on the easel, "Los Niños" (The Children), shows a ring of stylized figures in white, teal, and rose dancing in a golden vortex — the original oil from which UNICEF printed and sold four million cards, bringing DeGrazia international recognition virtually overnight. DeGrazia built his "Gallery in the Sun" from adobe bricks he mixed himself in the Sonoran Desert, and this postcard — shot by photographer Robert Davis — captures the artist in his element: outdoors, joyful, and utterly at home in the Southwest landscape he painted his entire life.