Antique 1900s Taber Bas Relief Niagara Falls Postcard 🌊 Glitter Embellished, Warwick Bros Toronto

What Two Fires Stand Behind This Card? 🌊 Antique 1900s Taber Bas Relief Niagara Falls Postcard, Warwick Bros, Toronto

Size: 5 1/2" x 3 1/2"

🌊 Two fires stand behind this little card, and neither of them is on it. The front is signed TABER BAS RELIEF Co. and captioned AMERICAN FALLS, NIAGARA FROM BELOW; the back is a Canadian Souvenir Post Card from Warwick Bro’s & Rutter, Limited, Publishers, Toronto. The photographer whose process made the image lost every negative he owned in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; the Toronto printing house whose name is on the back lost its building in the Toronto fire of 1904. The card outlived both.

🧷 Details

Approx. 5 1/2" x 3 1/2" ~
Divided-back souvenir postcard, unposted — no stamp, no message, no address
Hand-applied glitter picked out along the falling water, still bright
Printed on the front: TABER BAS RELIEF Co. · AMERICAN FALLS, NIAGARA FROM BELOW · 456 COPYRIGHT
Printed on the back: CANADIAN SOUVENIR POST CARD · THIS SPACE FOR CORRESPONDENCE / THIS SPACE FOR ADDRESS ONLY · Warwick Bro’s & Rutter, Limited, Publishers, Toronto · a postage box reading ONE CENT FOR CANADA AND U.S. / TWO CENTS FOR ABROAD · and along the right edge, TABER PAT. Nos. 21422–95 & 17225–96

📅 What dates it — and what does not

The two numbers on the right edge are the thing people misread. They are patent numbers for Taber’s bas-relief process, each carrying the year it was taken out — 95 and 96. They date the process, not the card, the same way a “since 1878” line dates a company rather than a label.

What does date the card is its back. This is a divided back — a printed vertical rule splitting correspondence from address — which the Canadian post office only permitted from the end of 1903. And the Toronto house named on it published picture postcards between 1903 and 1912, some 7,500 different cards in that window. Both ends agree: this sheet is Edwardian, not Victorian.

📷 Isaiah West Taber and the bas-relief process

Isaiah West Taber (1830–1912) ran one of the best-known photographic studios in San Francisco. His bas-relief process — patented in the mid-1890s, with a Taber Bas-Relief Photographic Syndicate operating out of San Francisco and a limited company of the same name incorporated in Britain in 1896 — printed a photograph so that the subject appeared to stand slightly proud of the paper, a soft sculptural relief rather than a flat picture. Held at an angle, this Niagara does exactly that: the water reads as a raised sheet coming off the card.

On 18 April 1906 the San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed Taber’s entire holdings — glass plates, view negatives, portrait negatives, decades of work on a subject he had helped make famous. His career effectively ended there, and he died on 22 February 1912. Every surviving Taber bas-relief image is a print that happened to be away from the building.

🍁 The Toronto house that printed its own

The firm took its name in 1893, when Warwick & Sons added Rutter. What made it unusual among Canadian postcard publishers was stubbornness about the work: while its competitors shipped their color lithography to Germany or England, Warwick printed on its own presses, in Canada. It is now reckoned the most prolific Canadian publisher of the postcard golden age, roughly 1900 to 1914, and a 400-page collectors’ handbook exists for nothing but its cards.

The Toronto fire of 1904 took the company’s premises on Front Street West, in the blaze that levelled much of the city’s wholesale district. Warwick rebuilt and kept printing — which is why cards like this one exist at all.

💌 Why a divided back matters

Before 1903 a postcard back belonged entirely to the address; anything you wanted to say had to be squeezed into the margins of the picture, or written across the image itself. The divided back — Britain 1902, Canada from the end of 1903, the United States 1907 — gave the sender half the back, and the picture postcard promptly became the text message of the Edwardian world. Billions were mailed. This one never was: no stamp, no postmark, no message, both halves of the back still blank.

❓ Questions People Ask

Do the 95 and 96 on the edge mean the card is from the 1890s? No. They are the years attached to Taber’s patent numbers for the bas-relief process. The card itself is dated by its divided back and its Toronto publisher, both of which put it after 1903.

What is “bas relief” on a postcard? A photographic process that gives the printed image a raised, sculptural look, so the falls appear to stand off the surface of the card.

Is the glitter original? It is applied decoration in the manner of the period — glitter and mica were used on souvenir and greeting cards throughout these years, worked by hand along a feature of the picture, here the falling water.

Was it ever mailed? No. It is unused, with both halves of the divided back clean.

🏡 Good for Niagara Falls and deltiology collections, Canadiana and Toronto printing history, San Francisco and Isaiah Taber photographic collections, framing, and anyone who likes an object with two disasters and a waterfall in it.