Antique 1910s - 1930s Reine Elisabeth Embossed Cigar Label 🚬 Rare

Who Was Reine Elisabeth? 👑 Antique Gold Embossed Belgian Cigar Label

Size: 9 1/4" x 4 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

Stunning! The colors jump right off this one, and the crest has to be one of the fanciest gold embossed royal arms I've seen on a cigar box: a gold crown over a red-and-ermine royal mantle, a gold lion on a black shield held up by two more gold lions, a ribbon and star hanging below, and REINE ELISABETH in raised cream letters on a wood-grain panel, all on a deep red field. Turn it over and the whole crest is pressed right through the heavy paper. It's a rare one, too. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🦁 The Queen of the Belgians

Reine Elisabeth is French for Queen Elisabeth. That gold lion on black is the lion of Belgium, and the queen is Elisabeth, Queen of the Belgians. She was born at Possenhofen Castle in Bavaria on July 25, 1876, the daughter of Duke Karl Theodor in Bavaria, who was an eye doctor, and she married Prince Albert of Belgium in Munich on October 2, 1900. Albert took the throne on December 23, 1909, and that's when she became Reine Elisabeth - which is why this label can't be any older than that.

The Belgians adored her for the First World War. German-born or not, she stayed with her adopted country, worked alongside the nurses at the front, lived with the king at De Panne on the last little corner of free Belgium, and even helped start a symphony orchestra for the field army. She loved music all her life, and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels still carries her name. Albert died in a climbing accident in the Ardennes in February 1934; when Queen Astrid was killed in a car crash the next year, Elisabeth came back to public life to help her son, and she lived to 89, dying in Brussels on November 23, 1965.

🚬 A Belgian Cigar

Reine Elisabeth was a Belgian cigar brand, and a long-lived one - it was still putting out collector band series decades later, marshals in 1968, great physicists in the '60s and a Brussels millennium set in 1980. This box label is the old-school kind, gold embossed, with gold leaf or bronze powder giving that raised gold its shine.

Labels like this are what antique advertising is all about - lithography that modern printing just can't touch, and pretty much a lost art after the 1920s, by artists who were very good, mostly paid very little and never credited. My pictures seriously don't do it justice. It's a beauty framed over a bar, in a den or in any room of the house.