Art Herstory Holiday Card for 2022

Each year Art Herstory offers a new holiday card design, which features (of course!) a work by a woman artist. In 2021, we presented Art Herstory’s first botanical holiday card: an amaryllis by Priscilla Susan Bury, a British artist of the nineteenth century.

This year, we expand on the botanical art theme. The 2022 holiday card reproduces “American holly / Ilex opaca” by American artist Mary Morris Vaux Walcott (1860–1940).

The art source is a digital art file of a color plate from Walcott’s book North American Wild Flowers, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1925. Sharp-eyed readers will note that a leaf on the left side is abruptly cut off. We assume that this is because the full artwork (with the whole leaf) did not fit in the available space for the holly plate in the book. The faint lines framing the artwork on the right, and underneath, also likely relate to the art’s presentation in the book, rather than to the original drawing.

We do not know where the artwork (a watercolor, perhaps?) is held, assuming it still exists. Art Herstory is grateful to Biodiversity Heritage Library for making the digital art file of the book plate accessible.

Art Herstory holiday cards are larger than Art Herstory note cards. They are A7 format (5×7″). They are available for sale in a 10-pack with holiday-red envelopes, or as individual cards (with matching envelopes) in an eco-friendly clear sleeve. The inside sentiment reads “Season’s Greetings.”

To order Art Herstory holiday cards online, visit the online Art Herstory Shop.

Limited quantities of Art Herstory Christmas cards from previous years are still available:

The Nativity of Christ, by Orsola Maddalena Caccia (Italian, 1596–1676)

Adoration of the Magi, by Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593–c.1654)

E. F. Seedling Amaryllis 1819, by Priscilla Susan Bury (British, 1799–1872)

If you prefer to buy your cards in-store, ask for Art Herstory holiday and/or note cards at one of the three Politics and Prose locations in Washington DC, or at Blue Cottage in Hinesburg, Vermont!