Antique & Vintage Postcards

A woman in a long Edwardian skirt strolls past the chain-and-bollard enclosure around Geneva's equestrian monument to General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, the Swiss Confederation's first general and co-founder of the International Red Cross, captured here in a crisp photographic halftone that preserves the gaslit streetscape, the terraced old city rising behind, and the Latin inscription "G.H. DUFOUR / HELVET DUX / MDCCCLVII / MDCCCLXV" — recording the years of his two commands — in pleasing legibility; published as card E.H. 128, this undivided-back card predates the 1906 Swiss divided-back standard and places us squarely in the Edwardian heyday of European postcard collecting, when Geneva was a magnet for tourists, diplomats, and the simply curious drawn to the city's radical beauty and political neutrality.