Love reading Cupid's hieroglyphic message – Vintage Print
(Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Love reading Cupid's hieroglyphic message, preserved in this historic image. Drawn from the Snapshots of the Past archive, it is an authentic piece of documented history.
Framed, it is ready for the wall; unframed, it is ready for the frame you choose. A fine choice for anyone who loves history, and a gift that gets noticed. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Since 2001, Snapshots of the Past has shipped historic prints to tens of thousands of customers around the world.
Love reading Cupid's hieroglyphic message
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Cupid is shown here as a reader rather than a shooter, puzzling over a message written in hieroglyphs, a playful twist on the usual Valentine's Day imagery. Victorian-era Valentines often borrowed classical figures like Cupid to suggest romance, and printers loved visual jokes that made the sender's meaning a little harder to decode. The idea of a secret, half-readable message appealed to a culture that prized sentiment and wit, and a card like this asked its recipient to work for the sweet part of the message. Beyond the clever premise, the picture shows how the holiday moved from handwritten notes to mass-produced cards with pictorial humor.
| Original scan | 1,462 × 1,650 px · prints to 5 × 6 in at 300 dpi |
|---|---|
| Reference | VAL-35 |
Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation.
