By Nathanael Hodge
Windswept Greetings
Vintage postcards from the late 19th– early 20th centuries often featured mills, offering a romanticised view of these buildings. Some were sold as souvenirs featuring local landmarks, others showed more generic imagery and were intended as cards for birthdays or other special occasions. As colour photography was not widely available until the 1960s, early cards often featured manually added colour. This was typically done through a process known as hand-tinting, where artists used watercolours, dyes or oil paints to apply colour directly to the photographic prints, giving them a more vibrant appearance. The selection of cards shown here are all birthday postcards from the Mills Archive Trust collection, in the next issue we will feature some of the souvenir postcards.
