Antique 1800s Victorian Candy Box Insert 👒 Blue Hat Lady German Chromolith NOS For Sale

An unused Victorian candy box top: a color-printed beauty in a huge blue plumed Gainsborough-style hat, framed in an embossed coral rope oval on a green rose-lattice ground, with PRINTED IN GERMANY at the foot of the design. New old stock from the 1800s, never mounted on a box.

• Type: candy box top / box insert, decorative picture card
• Era: Victorian, 1800s
• Printing: color lithograph (chromolithograph) with a fine stippled ground
• Mark: PRINTED IN GERMANY, small capitals, lower left of the front
• Subject: fair-haired young woman in a wide blue plumed picture hat, white off-the-shoulder gown, yellow rose at the bodice, copper-brown ground
• Border and ground: embossed coral rope-twist oval; pale green ribbon-and-leaf lattice with red rosettes
• Surface: fine ribbed finish on the front
• Reverse: plain kraft-tan board, embossed oval visible from behind
• Material: heavy paper board

New old stock. Never used or mounted on a box; bright color, crisp embossing, clean back. See the photographs.

The mark. Britain\'s Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 made imported goods declare their origin, aimed at German makers passing off inferior wares under British names. \"Made in Germany\" was meant as a warning and turned into a badge of quality; Ernest Edwin Williams\'s 1896 best-seller Made in Germany captured British alarm. In the United States the McKinley Tariff, signed October 1, 1890 and steered by Ways and Means chairman William McKinley of Canton, Ohio, raised average duties to nearly 50 percent and required imports to carry their country of origin in English from March 1, 1891. McKinley lost his House seat that fall and won the presidency in 1896.

The printing. Alois Senefelder invented lithography in Bavaria in 1796. Chromolithography gave each color its own stone, printed in register; it reached America by 1840, and in the late 1800s it dressed cigar boxes, trade cards and confectionery, with German houses, Leipzig foremost among their centers, leading the trade.

The box. Richard Cadbury of Cadbury Brothers in Birmingham, England decorated a chocolate box with his own painting of his young daughter holding a kitten in 1868, the same year the firm sold a heart-shaped Valentine box. Victorians kept fancy boxes as keepsakes long after the sweets were gone. In New York, John S. Huyler founded Huyler\'s in 1874; by 1910 it had 54 stores and 14 factories and ranked for a time as the largest chocolate maker in the country.

The hat, and the legend of the stolen Duchess. The wide plumed brim is the Gainsborough hat, named for Thomas Gainsborough\'s portraits, above all Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Three weeks after that painting sold for a record price in May 1876, Adam Worth, the \"Napoleon of Crime,\" stole it from Thomas Agnew & Sons in London and kept it 25 years, until its return in Chicago on March 28, 1901; lore says he inspired Conan Doyle\'s Professor Moriarty. The Gainsborough hat was high fashion from 1878 and returned at century\'s end atop Gibson Girl pompadours, later swelling into the Merry Widow hat of 1907 and a long-hatpin panic that led to a Chicago ordinance in 1910 limiting hatpins to nine inches.

The feathers. Plume hats killed birds by the millions. In 1896 Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall of Boston, Massachusetts held tea parties to talk society women out of feathered hats and founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society; Massachusetts banned the wild-feather trade in 1897, and the campaign helped pass the federal Lacey Act in 1900.

• Candy box, chocolate box and confectionery ephemera collectors
• Chromolithograph and German color printing collections
• Victorian fashion, millinery and hat history
• Dressing room, powder room and Victorian-lady wall groupings
• Framing in a cream or gold mat, kept out of strong sunlight