Vintage Treasure

Happy New Year everyone.

 

I sincerely hope your year started as well as mine. My Mother was sorting through some stuff recently and she found my Grandmothers old watercolours.

I started experimenting with watercolours and have heeded good advice from 

John Muir Laws

on how to „pimp“ a small travel palette and optimise the colour choice in it. So my Mother sent me my Grandmothers watercolour stash and oh goodness what a treasure. It is so much, I am going to split everything into several posts to really do it all justice.

First up is a student watercolour set made by the company Pelikan, this is a set that has been used in schools in Germany, Pelikan was a german company  founded in Hannover (my hometown) in about 1830s, and when I grew up  they were a standard school supply manufacturer.

I was trying to date this tin, but even with the serial number inside I could not find a proper timespan during which this tin would have been sold in shops. But what I found was some information about the company logo. On this page I found out that the logo was customized several times, the amount of Pelikan chicks in the nest was adapted to the amount of children the company owner had! Even though it doesn‘t give accurate information what years these changes took place, the logo was „streamlined“ from 4 chicks to 2 chicks in 1937, then even later down to 1 chick.

My tin has 4 chicks so I know it was made before 1937, my Grandmother might have had this in school.

I took out all the little tin pans and set them aside to allow the paints to soak up a little bit of water; in the meantime I set to work with water, a soft toothbrush and some toothpaste. I think the tin cleaned up quite nicely. I loved to see that the travel palettes back then were set up the same way as today: the paint section can be removed for extra mixing space...

And of course I had to try them out. The paints are still so beautifully vibrant, and they feel much nicer to work with than any modern pupil quality brand of watercolours. The only one to reactivate a little lumpy (gritty?) was the lovely purple on the bottom right. And what I would call a Sap Green today was called French Green Imit.

I can hardly wait to paint a proper little picture with these colours, but that is for another post...