Brown High School Revisited

A few days ago I wrote of Brown High School in Cambridge, Ohio, the school my father attended in the early ’30s. That post was illustrated with a postcard of the school, a rather ordinary-looking card that I found on eBay. I hadn’t thought much more about that postcard until I came across this photo in dad’s 1931 annual. The similarities were striking, and I wondered if the photo could in fact have been used as a template for the postcard. But while the photo obviously dates from 1931 or earlier, these postcards are usually found with postmarks from the ’40s. Basing postcard art on preexisting photos was commonplace, but would they have used so old a photograph?
A substantial number of differences exist between the two images. The most significant difference, and one that clashes with my template theory, is the perspective. The point of view in the postcard is slightly higher and more towards the front of the school, a subtle discrepancy that I found when overlaying one image transparently over the other with Photoshop. Today’s illustrators have tools at their disposal that would easily turn the photograph into the image as seen on the postcard, but such trickery wasn’t an option in the ’40s. With the huge number of postcard designs that came from this era, they certainly had a standard method of execution. It’s entirely possible that photographs were used only as a visual reference, with no form of tracing involved. This would give the artist latitude to make aesthetically pleasing changes, such as toning down the exaggerated perspective created by the camera. That’s almost certainly the case in this example, as the camera lens distorted the roof line considerably.
The scene was improved greatly by the addition of color, however simple its application may be. The clutter of distant buildings on the right hand side has been replaced by foliage, and the structure on the left (a church, I believe) has been replaced with a smaller one, making the Brown High building appear more substantial. A concerted effort seems to have been made to create a less urban setting for the school, but I find the addition of the large tree a bit odd, given that it blocks a considerable portion of the building. Of course, it also makes the building look less like a box, which could have been the intent. It’s also possible that such a tree was in fact present when the postcard was designed, and its addition made the image current. It’s hard to say how many of the changes were aesthetic and how many reflected actual changes over the years. Unfortunately there’s little in the way of historic data to enhance our understanding of the school and it’s evolution.