Antique Emil Flohri Chinese Children Color Print 🖼️ Chinatown Festival Street Scene Plate-Signed Wall Art Decor

Who Was Emil Flohri? 🏮 Two Children, Dressed for the Festival

Size: 16" x 12" ~ Aged paper.

This is one of those prints that stops you before you even notice the signature. Two children stand together on a Chinatown street, dressed in their absolute best. The older girl wears a golden-yellow robe banded in orange and pink at the sleeves and trouser cuffs, with a round medallion worked across the chest and a beaded headdress on her head, holding a big yellow paper parasol open behind her like a second halo. Beside her, a little boy in a blue jacket with pink cuffs and a gold cap stands close. Behind them the street is full of life - shopfronts hung with signboards and lanterns, a blossoming branch, pots of white narcissus, baskets, and big glazed jars stacked along the wall. Those narcissus are a lovely clue: narcissus is the flower Chinese families set out for the New Year, and blossoming branches go up for it too, so to my eye these two are dressed for Chinese New Year. It's a warm, affectionate little scene, and I could look at it all day.

Down in the lower right, worked right into the picture, is the artist's signature, FLOHRI, next to a small publisher's mark, (c) L.A. PUB. CO. A smaller printing of this same image carries the caption "Chinese Children" - that's where this print gets its name. This sheet itself carries no printed title.

🎨 The Man Who Signed It

Emil Flohri was an American illustrator, born October 27, 1869, in Roanoke, Virginia. He made his name first as a magazine man, drawing political cartoons and covers for Judge, the big illustrated humor weekly, in the years around 1900 through the 1920s - work that ran from playful to pointed, like his March 1900 Judge cartoon "Stepping Stone to China" and a September 1905 cartoon, "Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews." He also wrote and illustrated painting instruction books, teaching the craft he'd spent his career practicing. He started out drawing in pen and ink, moved on to the lithographer's stone and got very good at it - his full-color political cartoons for Judge are the showpieces of those years. Around 1920 he headed west to Los Angeles and turned to painting movie stars, and his portraits landed on the fan-magazine covers: Jackie Coogan and Mary Pickford on Screenland in 1923, and Rudolph Valentino on Motion Picture Magazine.

🎬 From Judge Magazine to the Disney Backlot

Then his career took a turn that still makes me smile. On March 19, 1930, Emil Flohri joined Walt Disney's studio, and he painted backgrounds for three of that year's Silly Symphonies - "Frolicking Fish," "Arctic Antics," and "Winter" - often working alongside fellow background artist Carlos Manriquez. So the same hand that signed this cheerful street scene also helped paint the worlds behind some of the earliest Disney cartoons. He died in 1938 and is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

L.A. Pub. Co. put its imprint on more than one of his images, this one among them.

🖼️ A Little Piece of an Illustrator's Story

I love finding prints like this - one that's more than pretty color on paper because there's a real career behind the name in the corner. Hang these two children dressed for a festival on your wall, and you're hanging a small piece of Emil Flohri's story too: magazine man, then Disney background painter, still turning up in his signature every time a print like this comes up for sale.