Tennis racket, from the Novelties series (N228, Type 3) issued by Kinney Bros.
Medium
Commercial color lithograph
Dimensions
Sheet: 2 3/4 × 1 3/16 in. (7 × 3 cm)
Classification
Prints|Ephemera
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick
Accession Number
Burdick 218, N228.154
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the vibrant world of 19th-century advertising with *Tennis Racket* from Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company's Novies series (N228, Type 3), a dainty 1889 chromolithograph measuring just 2¾ × 1⅛ inches. Issued as collectible ephemera, tiny print likely depicts a young woman in profile wielding a tennis racket, capturing the sport's rising allure among leisure classes. Tobacco firms like Kinney Bros. popularized these cards, tucked into cigarette packs to entice smokers and spark a collecting frenzy among Victorians. Tennis, then a fashionable pastime exploding in popularity post-1870s, s...
About the Artist
Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company · 1869–2011
**Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company (1869–2011)** Founded around 1869 by Francis Sherwood Kinney in New York City, the Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company quickly rose to prominence in the burgeoning American cigarette industry. Francis, a pioneering tobacco manufacturer, experimented with hand-rolled cigarettes using blends of Turkish and Virginia tobacco, scaling to mass production by employing Europ...