Victorian Spys

Prints by Vanity Fair artist Leslie Ward, Spy.

Not a lot to do with film locations you might think, but the interior set dressing that is used to provide a “classy” background to stately homes, accountants, solicitors and legal offices in films often incorporated Victorian prints produced by the Vanity Fair company in England prior to the First World War.

These prints were produced for about forty years, about one each week, and therefore making a collection of a couple of thousand different subjects.

“Kaleidoscope”, on-line, has a blog which refers to the Vanity Fair cartoons, or caricatures. These were drawn by two main artists, Leslie Ward, “Spy”, and Carlo Pellegrini, “Ape”, and more discussion about Vanity Fair is on soldierssoldiers.com, under prints and postcards.

Find a use of these illustrations in any film or TV production, and we’ll try to match them with one of the prints from our collection. Something else for you to keep your eyes open for. And what about the uses of Tretchikoff’s Green ladies, which, or who, appeared in any number of films of the 60’s and 70’s. Can you find those as well?

And a cartoon, in those days was a sketch, a caricature, an instant piece of art work, and nothing to do with walt Disney.

Victorian prints, are different from Victorian Prince, but are often pronounced or heard the same. See the dislexicon.