Paintings reveal what people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like

Swanson, Ana. "Paintings reveal what people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like." | Independent on line, 5 October 2015.

Subhead: "Lots of the ideas involve mechanized devices and flying while others, strangely, involve people interacting with marine life"

The provenance of the paintings is French, and the future is "France in the Year 2000." All the paintings are entertaining and instructive, with The New-Fangled Barber and Madame at Her Toilette showing a humorous interaction of a man barbered by a mechanical device and a woman beautified by devices apparently both mechanical and electric. Stressed in the layout of the article is At School, where we see boys with wired helmets and headphones listening to (?) — having put directly into their brains? — the data out of books being ground up in a mechanism with a crank: the crank turned by a boy while books are put into the device's hopper by a classic cartoon version of a pedagogue.

RDE 14Ap16

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¶¶TECHNICAL NOTE from graphics expert Chad Dresbach, on format issues (15Ap16): "The opening paragraph of the article says these images were exhibited and then given as cigar cards. This is correct since upon observing them would would infer that their either cards or they’re some kind of medium-sized litho print. For such an analysis, at the link, go down about 1/2 way down the web page, there’s an image of two men with winged apparatus fighting an eagle; note the ‘frame’ (outside of the black frame of the illustration), that sort of creamy colored paper. Once you begin looking at that, look at the image immediately below (men in a flying ‘war car’); you can detect — if barely — the same sort of substrate there as well.

"Several other factors lead to this conclusion: all the images are the exact same aspect ratio - same height v. width (this would be done for ease of reproduction); each has a rather large black frame around the image - this is needed for registration needs in reproducing a card/print series. Notice that each image has a kind of ‘pebble’ texture (look especially in sky, smoke and mountain visuals); this is the texture of a litho-stone (grease pencil on polished rock) […]. Theoretically, there would have to be 4 stones made for each image, one for each of the channels (CMYK) that would have different densities of grease pencil that - when layered on top of other colors - would optically mix to approximate a gamut of colors. My guess they they actually probably ended up using something like 6 stones per card, but, still, impressive; those grease layers were mixed and applied to the stone by hand.

"Also - and perhaps even more interestingly - below each image is a title. The title of this series is “France in the Year 2000” and there is set type (another giveaway: paintings don’t have hot type set into them) that says in French “EN L’AN 2000”; however, below each image is the title of the image, again in set type, this time in English. So these are English reproductions of a set of French images which, themselves, seem to be a manufactured set[…].

"I suspect these are cards of some size (perhaps 4” x 8” or smaller, down to the size of a contemporary baseball card) as opposed to larger-sized prints. The process, at that time, was definitely not cheap - it was labor intensive and slow. And there are a lot of these images; making them into larger sized prints just doesn’t make sense - even for the 23 images here, would that mean a person would collect all 23, then get frames (more expense) to hang them around their house? So, no, these were cards - something to be kept and placed in a curio cabinet or parlor table to be looked at and discussed, spurring imaginations and allowing people to just ‘think out loud’ about the possibilities of the future."