22.00USD
Of course we are fond of shoes! This IS, after all, Red Poulane! :) Here we have an absolutely wonderful French RPPC of a proud family, in "Sunday best," standing outside their shoe store. We are imagining that these are shoes and boots they make themselves, but possibly this is simply a retail shop. We cannot know. The young man might be the son, the younger brother, or an unrelated apprentice. Taking into account the style of the boy's haircut, the quality of his trousers, and the practical "workman-like" style of his footwear, compared to the relatively fancy dress of the man, the apprentice idea carries more than a little weight. We are including a close up of the woman in this listing, not because the man's mustache is anything less than fascinating, but because we were really touched by the very charming, yet homespun, efforts at decorating her otherwise rather dowdy dress. She is a very attractive young woman, and see how with these crenelation stitches and diamond shaped appliques she's worked into her dress she is saying, "I am a proper wife, and I wear a proper dress, but I'll be damned if I won't make at least this one small concession to my individuality!" :)
There is a good bit of surface wear on this card. We find this more often with RPPCs than with commercial postcards. The RPPC, frequently produced by an itinerant photographer and developed on site for a single individual or family, was as close to a "one-off" as we're likely to get in photo postcards. They were often valuable keepsakes and much loved, as this one must have been, and not always gently so.