H. Davis, Philadelphia, American League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company 1909 - 1911

This little card of H. Davis, a baseball player for the Philadelphia American League, was made by the American Tobacco Company. Can you imagine being one of the artists involved? I wonder if they worked from photographs, or if they had to pose the players themselves. The colors are flat and graphic, like a poster, but the face has some volume, with soft brushstrokes of pink and brown. There is an innocence about the image, a kind of naive tenderness in the way the face is rendered. The whole thing has a dreamlike quality, like it's been filtered through memory or nostalgia. It reminds me of other graphic artists, like Milton Glaser, who distilled images down to their essential forms. In its own way, this little card is also trying to capture something essential, freezing a moment in time and turning it into an icon.