Liebig Company’s Fleisch Extract Butterfly Girls

During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, many companies offered collectible trade cards as incentives to purchase their products. This advertising strategy was originally developed by Albert Poulain in the 1880’s. The strategy was to offer ‘sets’ of collectible trade cards that could be gathered by buying a company’s products and the included trade cards.

Trade cards sets included all kinds of topics, from illustrations of fairy tales, to historical figures and events, the alphabet, animals and nature, and so on including fairies. Company products marketed via this strategy ranged from chocolate to baking soda to meat products.

The trade cards themselves were produced using chromolithography, a high quality and relatively new process at the time with multi-color printing, and often die-cutting and embossing giving them a 3D texture.

The small set below are from a well know and sought after German collection of six trade cards labeled the ‘Liebig Company’s Fleisch Extract Butterfly Girls’, which marketed meat products, perhaps an unfortunate association for these fairy illustrations. However, these images by French artist Louis-Théophile Hingre were also included in chocolat products around the same time, which was a better association. Also, information about the various butterflies represented were included on the backs of the cards, and illustrations on the front showed the various life stages of the butterflies.

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