Vive Ste Cecile Saxophone Player

For months now I had this peculiar, vintage, French postcard on my eBay watch list. There has just been something very odd about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. This morning I finally took a closer look at it, and I realized it wasn’t at all what I thought it was.

This Vive Ste Cecile saxophone player postcard isn’t an old, colourized portrait that ended up getting scooped up by a dealer in an estate sale. This postcard depicts someone who was just posed with a saxophone, but clearly didn’t play it.

Why do I think this young man isn’t a sax player? Well two things give it away very quickly. 1) The mouthpiece is on upside down, and 2) His left hand is nowhere near the left hand keys.

Had I looked at the post card closely when I first saw it, I would have realized that’s what struck me as odd. As it was, a quick glance just made me think that someone had their portrait done in the late 1930s or 40s, and that after their death the estate disposed of it.

I actually felt sorry for the poor guy. I wondered what happened to him. Did he have family? Did he have a partner? Didn’t anyone want to keep a reminder of him and his beloved saxophone?

This photo also got me thinking about all the images that are taken today, and how so many of them are never printed. In fact, if you think about it, photos we take digitally today, and never print, don’t really exist. We are just one crash, computer virus, hard drive failure, whatever, away from losing the pictorial history of our lives… Unless we of course do what computer experts suggest and backup our files at least once, but preferable twice.

But I digress… Back to this Vive Ste Cecile saxophone player postcard…

After I had taken a closer look at the postcard this morning, and had determined that this was likely not a portrait, I Googled Vive Ste Cecile to see what would come up. Although I couldn’t find any information about the company, I did find a great many listings and images through the search engine.

One image I stumbled across happened to be on this UK-based collectible site, was especially on point. Again we have a postcard by Vive Ste Cecile featuring a saxophone player, but this time the man is holding a silver alto, keyed to low B only. Although the mouthpiece is on the horn correctly this time, he clearly has no idea how to place either his left or right hands. Obviously he was not a sax player.

However, this website shows us the back of the card, so we can see that it was never used. Yes, it was indeed done up as a postcard. Given the great many different types of images that Vive Ste Cecile did up, it seems unlikely that the company was in the habit of doing one-off portraits of individuals (which could have been done up as postcards), but rather commercial postcards intended for the masses.

That said, perhaps Vive Ste Cecile also did individual portraits, as well as commercial, stock photography. At this point it’s all a bit of a mystery. The only thing that’s not mysterious is the fact that far and away the majority of musicians they depicted in their photos, really didn’t know how to handle the instruments they were photographed with.

If anyone has some information about Vive Ste Cecile postcards that they can share, please leave a comment below. Thanks!