The benefits of smoke - "An Album of Film Stars", John Player & Sons cigarette cards, 1934

 

John Player & Sons, most often known simply as Player's, was a tobacco and cigarette manufacturer based in Nottingham, England. Founded in 1877, the company merged with other companies to form The Imperial Tobacco Company in 1901, while retaining the Player's brand name.

Player's was one of the first British tobacco companies to include sets of general interest cards in their packs of cigarettes. These cards - now highly collectable - were generally produced in sets of fifty, and could be collected and put into specially created albums. One of the first sets, from 1893, was "Castles and Abbeys." Among the many, many sets they produced were those related to stage and screen performers, civil aircraft, motor cars, traditional British street vendors, flora and fauna identifying cards for Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, military uniforms, a coronation series in 1937, and several related to sports, including football (soccer), rugby, and cricket. John Player & Sons eventually issued more than two hundred sets of cards.

I find the phrase related to his marriage to Crawford, "at one time", rather amusing; they'd only divorced months before.

Again, "at one time."

This album from 1934 featured the film actors who were considered to be the "hot properties" of the moment. So interesting to consider which of these performers went on to continued or greater success, and which are those whose names are now only recognized by the most pedantic of film scholars.

Work attire - two self-portraits by Ernst Neumann, 1930 and 1931

 

1930.

1931.

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Ernst Neumann (7 May 1907, Budapest, Hungary - 19 March 1956, Vence, France), Canadian artist. When he was five years old, his family immigrated to Canada from Hungary and took up residence in Montréal. After high school, he attended both the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and the Art Association of Montréal, at the latter studying with painter and engraver Edwin Holgate. He went on made a consistent living as an artist, producing work in several spheres, including portraiture. But the work he was most passionate about was depictions of the marginalized society - the poor and unemployed - during the Great Depression, engravings that would often be reproduced in Montréal's more left leaning newspapers and periodicals. In 1936, with his former École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal classmate, Goodridge Roberts, he opened the Roberts-Neumann School of Art; it was able to remain open for only three years. In 1956, funded by a fellowship grant, he travelled to Europe but, while visiting a fellow artist in France, he suffered a heart attack and died. He was only forty-eight.

Another self-portrait, 1930.

Selling dystopia - early promotional artwork for "Metropolis"

 

The original artwork that was adapted for so many of the images here was by Werner Graul (1905-84).