Hotsell 1940s Eyvind Earle & Ball VTG Christmas Card Family Holiday shoppers joyful gifts presents snow 10X61 Unused

- Vintage (early 1940s) Christmas card
- Eyvind Earle
- Earle & Ball
- Measures approximately 6 1/4" x 4 1/8"
- Sealed Envelope included
- In great unused vintage condition
-Box is not included, but shown for historical data
-Christmas/New Year message on the inside


box numbered 100EC 654

Pre - American Artists Group and Disney


From Eyvind Earle's website "At the same time one of my best friends from California, Everett Ball, joined us, and together we printed thousands of cards sometimes working 36 hours without sleep during the final months before Christmas.
The next year, after separating from Bob Monroe, Everett Ball and I started a new company called Earle and Ball that lasted until I was drafted into the Navy in October of 1943"

In 1937, at the age of 21, Earle set out for New York on his bicycle, painting a watercolor on each of the 42 days it took him to cross the continent. Only a year later, the Charles Morgan Galleries held a show of the paintings to critical acclaim, hotsell and the gallery continued to show his work each year. In 1940, The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought one of his watercolors for its permanent collection. That painting, entitled Weatherbeaten, depicts a lone farmhouse and a stand of bare trees, with the spring snow beginning to thaw into patches of mud. The scene lacks the visionary quality of Earle's mature work, but long fingers of shadow and one gaunt tree hint at his later landscapes.

1940 was also the year when Earle began his work with serigraphy. In Stamford, Connecticut, he founded his own Christmas card company, designing the cards and making them himself. At first, he printed by hand from linoleum blocks, then graduated to screen printing as well. "I never had a lesson in serigraphy," he confesses happily. "I learned by doing the Christmas cards. You go to the store and buy the materials, and you get a little instruction book. It isn't very complicated."

Earle's life of screen printing cards was interrupted in 1943, when he was drafted

the years he would spend in the 1950s working for Walt Disney {beginning as a background painter and rising quickly to the position of art director on Sleeping Beauty} and the years after he left Disney to produce, paint, and photograph animated films and commercials with his own company.