Antique Gold Embossed Label 🥁 1910s-1920s Colonial Couple Drummer Flower Basket Folk Art Chromolithograph NOS Ephemera

Who Is the Drummer Boy on This Gold Label? 🥁 A drummer boy, a girl with a rose, and a frame of gold

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

The boy with the drum is one of the most copied figures in American art. A Cleveland painter made him famous at the nation's 100th birthday party in 1876, marching beside a fifer and an old flag-bearer, and he has been beating his drum on prints ever since. On this small unused label he stands in a tricorn hat and a maroon coat, sticks raised, next to a girl in a tall white lace cap holding a single red rose. Behind the pretty picture sit real stories: what drummers actually did in an 18th-century army, how old the real ones were, the Centennial that sent Americans searching for their colonial past, and the printing trade behind labels like this one.

What is printed on it

A rectangular gold-bordered label. On the left, a girl in folk costume, tall pointed lace cap, laced and embroidered bodice and long striped skirt, with a cloth-covered basket over her arm, holding a rose up in her free hand. On the right, a boy drummer in a tricorn hat, coat, waistcoat with a striped sash and knee breeches, both sticks caught mid-beat on his corded drum.

Below the picture runs a blank cream panel inside its own gold rule, left empty for a name or a product. The back of the label is blank, and the relief of the figures shows through it, pressed in from the front.

What an 18th-century drummer really did

A drum was the army's clock and its loudspeaker. Drum and fife signals ran the day in camp: calls summoned officers and musicians, sent men out to gather wood, and told them when to draw rations. Calls began at headquarters and were repeated from unit to unit until the whole camp had heard. "The General" meant strike the tents and get ready to march; "The Assembly" meant fall in at the colors; "The March" set the column moving. On the road the drum set the marching pace, and in battle it carried the officers' orders over the noise.

The night had its own call. "The Tattoo," beaten at nine o'clock in fall and winter and ten in spring and summer, told local innkeepers to turn off the taps and stop serving the soldiers for the night.

The myth of the little drummer boy

The picture on this label is a boy, and so is the drummer in nearly every painting. The real musicians were mostly older than the legend. A study of the Continental Army's drummers and fifers puts the average musician at about 18 and a half years old, drummers at 19 and fifers at 17. Across 18th-century armies there were young ones: the British military writer Bennett Cuthbertson, a theorist of how an infantry battalion should run, recommended in 1768 that boys under fourteen be enlisted to train as drummers, and the youngest were about twelve. But drummers often stayed with a regiment for years or decades, so one regiment could have drummers from twelve to fifty.

🎨 The painting that made the drummer boy an American icon

Archibald Willard, a painter from Cleveland, Ohio, made the image stick. At the suggestion of Cleveland businessman James Ryder he painted an 8 by 10 foot canvas, first called "Yankee Doodle," for the Centennial celebrations in Philadelphia: an old white-haired flag-bearer, a fifer and a boy drummer marching across a Revolutionary battlefield. Art critics called it a cartoon. The public loved it. Ryder marketed it hard, crowds came to see it and bought inexpensive color prints, and after the fair it toured the country from Boston to San Francisco. Willard painted as many as thirty versions. Renamed "The Spirit of '76," the original hangs in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

🏛️ The Centennial and the Colonial Revival

The Centennial International Exhibition ran in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, marking one hundred years since the Declaration of Independence. One of its most popular attractions was the "New England Farmer's Home and Modern Kitchen," where women in colonial dress showed off a Pilgrim's cradle and a spinning wheel. At a time of fast industry, crowded cities and new waves of immigrants, Americans began to look back on their colonial past as a golden age.

That feeling became the Colonial Revival, a taste for early American houses, furniture, gardens and costume that outlasted the six-month fair and shaped American design well into the twentieth century.

The blank panel and the stock label

The empty panel at the bottom is the clue to how labels like this were sold. Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in the late 18th century, printed pictures from a flat stone or plate, one stone or plate for each color, and by the late 1800s it was the favorite way to make picture labels. Printers kept stock labels on hand: an attractive general design with a space left open for a customer's name. A small business that could not pay for its own artwork bought stock labels and had its name overprinted in black. In the fruit-crate trade, the Stecher-Traung Lithograph Company's stock design number 1043 was the most common label of all in Washington State, and about 8 percent of the roughly 5,000 labels known from there were stock labels. Champagne labels from the big wineries of the period used gold, silver and bronze for show.

This one never got its name. The panel is still empty, and the label was never used.

Condition

New old stock: unused, never applied, the gold border bright and the colors clean. The back is blank, showing the relief of the picture from the front.

🥁 About these

The supply is finite - nobody's embossing these drummer-boy labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.