Beside the seaside?

I found this old postcard in my drawer at work. I can't remember where it came from now. There's no message on the back to give a clue as to its original owner either.
     At first glance I thought it was taken en plein air, and no doubt that's the intention, so that the sitter can send evidence home of her holiday in the sun. But a second glance soon dissolves the apparent reality: the sand looks oddly dark and firm, and, what's that? A skirting board? And then the clincher: this Blackpool Tower has none of the symmetry of the real thing, this one's positively wobbly. Then you realise that the lady is sitting in front of a painted backdrop with a skyline of buildings that only approximates to the actual Blackpool townscape.

The big wheel was erected at the Winter Gardens in 1896 (the photo of the lady looks as though it was taken in the 1920s, I think). It was almost directly behind the Tower, so it appears to move from one side of the Tower to the other depending on the photographer's viewpoint.

But it's also possible that the backdrop was drawn from a reversed image, so the wheel has gone over to the right-hand side.

You can see that the backdrop artist has approximated the turrets and frontage of the base of the Tower, but they haven't really got the buildings on either side quite right.

Image © lovedaylemon and courtesy of Flickr

Here's another photo taken in front of the very same backdrop! The canvas probably hung in the studio of photographer Charles Howell, at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, where the donkey (stuffed?) did sterling work.
     I love the idea of being photographed in front of a bad reproduction of the place that's just outside the studio door!

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seaside postcards

 This is actually a 'real' collection in the sense that I've gone out looking for very specific postcards to add to it and have invested time and (a small amount of) money in it.

     They are postcards on a seaside theme, carefully chosen with art projects in mind, so a lot of them have people in the foreground:

I especially love these washed out looking ones with many people wandering around:

There are subsets of Butlins cards, shading into 'seaside structures' and 'bright lights', also Blackpool. I love both the popular culture of the seaside and the idea of people captured unawares, so these cards are a very rich source of imagery for me.

structures

Butlins

Ooh, makes me want to head for the edge of the land... Here are a couple of my (big -- A1-size) pictures based on postcards:

Mini collection 29

Seaside souvenirs and fun

Altered postcards

The seaside comes to the park in my home town, Richmond, Yorks

It's postcard swap weekend no. 5 and some of us are having terrible problems with Blogger, locked into our own blogs like princesses in towers, and unable to post on Postman's Knock. That gives me an excuse to re-show the card I made for Jane, and also to show the four other cards I made afterwards along the same lines.

Some sort of madness gripped me. I was seeing seaside scenes on mountain tops and in grim shopping centres.

You can see some of the same figures recur. I don't think I've quite worked these out of my system yet, as I have a slightly different take on this theme to try, but I'm such a terrible dabbler that my skittish mind is on something else just now.