Trade card for Auguste Delâtre, publisher and printmaker

Auguste Delâtre

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This object is housed in an album of British trade cards from the collections of Bella C. Landauer, Ambrose Heal, and others. The term “trade card” is of nineteenth-century origin and refers to a card that advertises the services of an individual or business. Eighteenth-century trade cards were often printed on thin sheets of paper and referred to as “tradesmen’s cards,” “tradesmen’s bills,” or “shopkeeper’s bills.” During the Victorian era, trade cards were often reinforced on pasteboard and closely resemble business cards today. Born in Paris in 1822, Auguste Delatre was printer of etchings and aquatints. Around 1850 Delatre opened his own printing house which was quickly famous in France and abroad. Delatre moved to London in 1860 to found an engraving section in the South Kensington Museum, and he returned to London from 1871 to 1876 after his house and workshop were partially destroyed by Prussian bombardment and Commune.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art