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Saturnalian Santa
Sunday, 24 December 2017 18:32OK, so see the icon I am using for this post? I made it probably more than ten years ago now from this image, which I had found while Googling for hoary, pagan-looking Victorian Santas:
I absolutely fell in love with it - the way he is rising up from the feast, the very personification of all the merriment and good cheer, with his holly-bough garland and hearty blessings. I could see from the shaded oval behind him that it must be cropped from a larger image, but no amount of Googling likely search terms brought anything larger up.
Until this year, when, having occasion to use it once again, it occurred to me that Google reverse image search now exists. So I popped in the image I had, and bingo! Within a few seconds I had learnt that it came from the Illustrated London News of 1847, had been drawn by one Kenny Meadows, and furthermore could be purchased from eBay for a princely £12.95. Well! I wasn't going to pass that up, so I ordered it straight away, had it delivered to my Dad's, and opened it yesterday when I arrived as an early Christmas present to myself.
( Here, under the cut, is the full image in all its crisp 170-year-old glory )
I think I will frame it when I get home and look for a nice place on the wall to hang it. I should update the icon too, now that I have a better-quality image. But for now it's enough to share and gaze upon. I hope you like it too!
I absolutely fell in love with it - the way he is rising up from the feast, the very personification of all the merriment and good cheer, with his holly-bough garland and hearty blessings. I could see from the shaded oval behind him that it must be cropped from a larger image, but no amount of Googling likely search terms brought anything larger up.
Until this year, when, having occasion to use it once again, it occurred to me that Google reverse image search now exists. So I popped in the image I had, and bingo! Within a few seconds I had learnt that it came from the Illustrated London News of 1847, had been drawn by one Kenny Meadows, and furthermore could be purchased from eBay for a princely £12.95. Well! I wasn't going to pass that up, so I ordered it straight away, had it delivered to my Dad's, and opened it yesterday when I arrived as an early Christmas present to myself.
( Here, under the cut, is the full image in all its crisp 170-year-old glory )
I think I will frame it when I get home and look for a nice place on the wall to hang it. I should update the icon too, now that I have a better-quality image. But for now it's enough to share and gaze upon. I hope you like it too!
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