Of everything an artist makes, the Christmas card is the thing most likely to end in the bin. It arrives in December, stands on a shelf for a few weeks and goes out with the wrapping paper in January. Yet these small sheets paid some artists their first wages, sold by the million, and a few of them now sit in museum collections next to paintings.
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What a Christmas Card Asks of an Artist
A Christmas card asks a lot of a small rectangle. It has to read at arm's length, print cheaply and please strangers. In exchange, it offered artists a steady income and a public far larger than any gallery could gather.
The custom took hold in the 1800s, when postage became cheap and color printing spread, and it soon reached well beyond Britain. Artists of every kind took the work, some for publishers and shops, others for a handful of friends.
Every work below went out into the world as a Christmas card, even when it began life as a painting. Each was chosen for the story it carries as much as for its picture, and almost none was made to last.
12. Tyrus Wong, The Shepherd (1954)
On a small card from 1954, a shepherd and his flock are barely bigger than grains of rice. Above them rise trees of bright pink. The card sold more than a million copies. Its painter had come to America as a boy of nine, and had already given a Disney film its look without ever seeing his name on it.
Tyrus Wong arrived from China in San Francisco in 1920, when the Chinese Exclusion Act kept most Chinese immigrants out of the United States. At Angel Island, the immigration station in the bay, he was held for nearly a month, separated from his father.
Art gave him a way in. He trained at the Otis Art Institute and joined Disney in 1937 to draw the frames that fill the gaps between the main poses of an animation. His watercolor studies became the visual source for Bambi, yet for years his name appeared nowhere. He left the studio in 1941, before the film came out.
Christmas cards reached him through a side door. After the war, a former Disney colleague told him that studio artists earned extra money by designing them. In 1952 his first three designs for a small firm, California Artists, multiplied its sales more than five times. From 1953 he painted up to thirty a year with a bamboo brush, and his wife Ruth worked alongside him.
His cards joined two traditions, the brushwork and open space of Chinese landscape painting and the shepherds and snow of a Western Christmas, and The Shepherd was his biggest success. California Artists named him Artist of the Year in 1955, and in 1964 Hallmark built a promotion around him, the only one it gave an artist that year.
In 1967 the publisher Duncan McIntosh went further. He called the boy once held on Angel Island "America's favorite Christmas card designer."
At a Glance
Artist: Tyrus Wong (1910 to 2016)
Made: 1954
Medium: Printed greeting card, for California Artists
Size: 11.4 × 15.9 cm (4.5 × 6.25 in)
Where to see it: The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan (Greeting Card Collection)
11. Kay Sage, Noel (undated)
Two surrealist painters shared a house in Woodbury, Connecticut, and every December they sat down to make Christmas cards for their friends. When one of them died, the other carried on alone, and one of her cards is made of nothing more than a paper clip, two rubber bands and a scrap of cardboard.