Since Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his metamorphic portraits (made up of fruits, flowers or little animals) in the 16th century, several artists decided to make this kind of composite paintings.

In particular, in the last decade of the 19th century, postcards with metamorphic caricatures of famous people or mythological characters became popular. There didn´t use to be much information about the author of the caricatures, sometimes not even the name of the publisher could be found.

In this exhibition you can see almost seventy examples of metamorphic postcards. We include the name of the author in the few cases in which he is a known artist. However, we have found out an important fact: a lot of these metamorphic postcards were not totally original. They were inspired in photographs or classical portraits and the metamorphic artists replace the original faces with composite ones. This is why in some examples we will also present the original source.

Most of these postcards were published from 1890 to 1920, so we present here an old and fascinating collection. We hope you enjoy it.

Metamorphic postcards Buy the exhibition catalogue in Lulu.com Buy the exhibition catalogue in Amazon.com This book includes a great collection of metamorphic postcards.

METAMORPHIC POSTCARDS

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