This blog began with my intention to interpret vintage artist-signed postcards through the lens of art history. But almost from the beginning, my blog seemed to take on a life of its own. It quickly morphed into a series of stories about the lives of people behind the postcards.

As soon as I started researching the Tuck family of postcard publishers and artist Phil May, strange things began to happen. Newspaper databases revealed story after story about Hugo Tuck’s murder, Phil May’s affair and family crises that had been hushed up for the past one hundred years. Much to my amazement, these stories did not appear in books. They were unknown to the postcard collecting community.

Then one day, while looking through my collection, the postcard shown above, by artist Phil May, jumped out at me. Suddenly, I realized that this postcard probably showed how Phil’s affair with a married woman was discovered. I began to feel almost as if Hugo Tuck and Phil May wanted me to tell the true stories of their lives after a century of silence. To tell their stories, my training as a social worker was far more helpful than my training in art history!

So this is what you will read in my blogs- stories of the men and women who created these beautiful old artist-signed postcards. Some, like Phil May, weathered crisis and adversity to rebuild their lives. Others, like Hugo Tuck, struggled to fit in with society only to end their lives tragically. In this respect, our human experience today is not so different than it was a century ago. We all struggle to make sense of both triumphs and tragedies.

I hope you will enjoy these stories as much as I enjoy writing them. –Anne Ross

Copyright 2023 Barbara A. Ross