19th Century Gruesome Kitchen Staff Print - The Sausage Makers - Charles Dickens Meets Sweeney Todd

Treasures from the FOOD & DRINK COLLECTION at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 24 x 16, and consciously formatted to work with a 24 x 16 frame, or custom framed as you see fit. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

Kids filled some of their time in the late 19th century with scrap booking. To feed this insatiable hunger was an ever increasing supply of paper scrap produced for just this purpose by companies in Germany and England. Most of the images are quaint, charming, wholesome and all around 'gee whiz'. Still, some of them are delightfully horrid, with Dickensian characters press ganged from the dregs of the common man. Woo hoo!

OK... in this case far from the dregs, as we have three likely gainfully employed kitchen staff in a caricature of the Downton Abbey style, 'warts and all', or at least purveyors from the low end of High Street.

Hmmmmmmm... The Low End Of High Street. Gives me an idea for a Kurt Weill meets Music Hall number for our next burlesque throw down! 

This trio started out roughly four inches tall. I bought them years ago from a stack of crumbling scrap book pages at a flea market in Upstate New York. The left two stand just as they were, glued to the old acid burned paper. The gal on the right was on the same page, but we had to move her around a bit. All three needed considerable yet subtle work to make it appear as if we just blew them up... part of the delightful digital alchemy that goes on here all the time.

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.