19th Century Austrian Fashion Plates

"Mein Herr, ich kleide mich nach der letzten Mode, Sie nach der vorletzten, ich dulde daher keine Zurücksetzung!" [something vaguely like: 'My good sir, I dress according to the latest fashion and you according to an outdated fashion, so I bear no neglect']


One of these images bears a pencilled date as 1853 and all are Vienna Theatre plates - either posters or program illustrations from the Vienna Museum. {Some background artifact has been removed or cleaned up from a few of these images}.

They are part of a site that went live this week: 'The Art Database of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria'.

"The site aims to restore art treasures looted during WWII to their rightful owners or heirs. According to Austrian law, works of art, which were looted under National Socialism in Austria, shall be returned to the original owners or to their legal successors. It is a statutory task of the National Fund to sell those objects of which no rightful owner can be found and to distribute the proceeds to victims of the National Socialist regime. Before the actual sale of the objects, the National Fund offers the possibility to identify restitutable art-objects by providing an art database in the internet."

The site divides up into prints, paintings, furniture, sculpture etc but there is only a modest number of images available at present ('druck grafiken' holds about 140 images - not just fashion - I seem to recall). There is only a single page in english at the moment, although they expect to expand this next year. Spiegel news story - [translation] [via Netbib]