Those of you who have spent a fair amount of time looking through old picture postcards, as I have, will probably have seen postcards featuring a photo of a young woman with the caption "Mignon".
Mignon was a hugely popular postcard theme, especially in France, due largely to the 1866 opéra comique
Mignon by Ambroise Thomas, based on the 1795-96 novel
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The character of Mignon was abducted and raised by Gypsies, and she is usually shown holding a mandolin, less often a guitar.
Here's a card depicting "The Regrets of Mignon", mailed locally within Bresles, France, in December 1904:
This card doesn't contain the title "Mignon", but it's clearly from the same series as the card above, with the same model posing on the same rocks. It was mailed from Bruyères-sur-Oise to Méru, France, in April 1907:
Mignon postcards were also popular outside of France. Here's one mailed from San Francisco to San José, California, in April 1913:
And here's one mailed from Constantinople, where Mignon is holding a chicken instead of a mandolin. The postmark is too faint for me to read the date, but the stamps were issued in 1916:
Please share any Mignon postcards you may have in your own collection!
Posted 12/18/2022 12:27 am
