Talk:Happy Merchant

Philipp Rupprecht

Looks like someone else originally drew this antisemitic depiction

https://i.imgur.com/QzRlwIN.jpeg

https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Das-Reich-ist-Arisch/F46D0BEB65915F56B92342FCC8910C9C

https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2022_02/10/14/145501346/383e8c8e-a55a-4271-a494-84d4ca1184ea.Jpeg 70.92.162.105 (talk) 03:43, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

No, it's a recent forgery.

1. The typeface of the "Neuauflage zum Fuhrergeburtstag..." text is called "Codex", which was designed in 1954. Compare for yourself by pasting said text into the sample box here: https://www.linotype.com/268/codex-family.html
2. The right caricature is traced from this, actual, Philipp Rupprecht caricature: https://archive.org/details/LesJuifsSePresentent-Fips/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater

Notice how the original caricatures contain more detail and show far better control of the drawing instrument. What's on the Mutualart site however, seems to merely be crudely traced in Sharpie on a tea-stained sheet of A4 printer paper. If not an intentional forgery, then perhaps an assignment from a highschool history project that a student wanted to see if he could sell. And apparently did. –Vuccala (talk) 02:02, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't be so quick to call it a forgery for a few reasons.

1. The Codex font's info states that it's based on 13th century German Gothic script. It's entirely possible there was another typeface based on the same source or the text on the Merchant cartoon was simply done by hand. This is supported by the fact that it's hardly 1:1 with Georg Trump's version of the font: https://i.imgur.com/fEYsYpe.png
2. It's entirely possible the appearance of tracing is simply due to the 1940 collection being made with lower quality printing. Given the timeframe it's not unreasonable that the German state was prioritizing more pristine printing material for the war effort and Rupprecht simply had to make do with what was available. Bougas could have been working with an earlier, higher quality print or simply adapted it to his own art style.
3. This is circumstantial, but it seems hard to believe the auction house which sold the cartoon would be so easily taken for a ride with something like this. I'm sure they have entire teams whose job it is to authenticate these sorts of items.

Thebruh420 (talk) 08:38, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Thebruh420:

3: Sites like MutualArt and Worthpoint are not auction houses. They're companies that scrape auction sites like eBay and Etsy for listings and then sell paywalled access to anyone wanting to find how much the items sold for.

2. The pic you found wasn't printed, it was traced in black marker. You can tell by the dark splotches where the tracer dragged the marker too slowly and the ink bled into the paper. With low-quality Nazi-era propaganda prints (as demonstrated here), the opposite is the case: areas where the printing plate got 100% inked are consistently dark, and spots that didn't get enough ink appear faint. On your find there are no faint-spots indicative of printing.

1. "Based on" doesn't mean the typemaker copied an existing font. It means the typemaker followed the general style of feel of 13th C. Gothic German type, while making something new and marketable that he could sell. This is what 13 C. Gothic German type looks like. You can see he kept the lowercase shapes of the e, g, u, and the feel of the pointy ascenders and descenders, but modernized the now foreign-looking letters like k, y and z, and did away with the flourishing uppercase. And the minor inconsistencies you point out are what one would expect when hand-tracing on a sheet of paper put on a computer monitor or tablet, coupled with an unskilled hand.

I want you to know that when I first read your addition, I was excited and thought it was amazing that the pic of the "Merchant" was far older than I expected. I went to look for sources that I could add to improve your addition to the article (since an auction listing isn't considered a source/reference), but then when I saw the book of Philipp Rupprecht's actual prints I reluctantly realized it couldn't be true, because the prints in the book have more detail on the Schmierfink than in your finding, which means your finding had to be a tracing of it. Then I realized the "Merchant's" face too has these sloppy areas of poor tracing, and the marker bleed. And the modern-looking font. And then there's the fact that Nick Bougas wouldn't need to trace someone else since he's an artist who could simply draw anything that came to his mind (indeed, the style of all his other caricatures are consistent with the "Merchant" drawing – which wouldn't be the case if for just for this one pic he has traced a German artist from the 1940s).

It's an interesting find though! These kind of discoveries that flip our understanding of something we thought we knew everything about are always exciting, and we came close to that here. –Vuccala (talk) 21:01, 15 April 2024 (UTC)