1890s Original French Game Sheet, Les Cubes Amusants - Framed

Date: 1890s
Size:  7.6 x 12 inches
Notes: Poster, small poster, ephemera, framed
Artist: Anonymous

About The Poster: This wonderful piece of 1890's ephemera came to me from a woman who is as fascinated by old paper as I am. The two of us spent hours staring at what these paper prints are - some sort of game called Les Cubes Amusants featuring various costumed characters, who are in and of  themselves fairly fascinating and taken as a group these three pieces are a hoot, as well as an incredible historical find. In looking up board games and their history I came across a blog entry by someone which seemed to confirm some of what I had been thinking. To wit: " ...the prints seem to me to contain a wealth of indirect evidence about things like customs and social status and attitudes to education and maybe a whole lot more besides... it's perhaps quite logical to most people and second nature to historians. That doesn't detract, for me, from the elegant thinking I see in deciding to sift through a pile of otherwise inconsequential illustrated material to learn more about history. That sort of detective work makes history more appealing, more alive somehow. ...In the meantime, a few little excerpts from the 'The Development of the English Board Game, 1770 - 1850' by Caroline G. Goodfellow IN: The International Journal for the Study of Board Games. "There are only a few basic methods of playing [board] games and over the past 250 years many thousands of variations have been created. The basic methods of play come down to four types – race games, strategy games, table games and card games. Many were originally developed for adults and were later adapted for children. [..] Many of the first publishers of games were in fact cartographers..." (www.bibliodyssey.com) When you look closely at the figures you can indeed see much of the social structure of French society - highbrow and lowbrow, just about everything is illustrated in these wonderful, unlined pieces, that have been matted and framed.