Vintage Christmas Prints: Prang, Rackham and Nast

A vintage Christmas print, in the sense collectors use it, is a reproduction of art made in the decades when Christmas imagery was being invented: roughly the 1860s to the 1910s. That window covers the Civil War Santas in Harper's Weekly, the chromolithographed cards of the 1870s and 1880s, Edwardian postcards and the illustrated gift books of the early 1900s.

The age matters for a practical reason too. Art published that long ago is out of copyright in the US: on January 1, 2026, Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain marked works from 1930 entering the public domain, and everything in this guide is older than that. That's what lets a print shop scan an 1877 card or a 1915 plate and print it on new paper today.

What you get on the wall is the original picture, reproduced: the colours a lithographer chose, the line of a pen, sometimes the caption printed under the image. Our vintage Christmas prints are giclée prints on 230gsm archival matte paper, made to order in up to ten sizes from 5×7 to 32×40 inches.

Louis Prang (1824–1909) was a Prussian-born printer who ran a colour printing firm in Boston in the late nineteenth century. According to the Boston Public Library, which holds the firm's archive, his factory began producing Christmas cards in the 1870s, and the library's Prang collection runs to more than 1,500 chromolithographs and dozens of sample books of greeting cards.

Chromolithographs are colour lithographs, and Prang's cards are full of flowers, holly, children in winter coats and snowy fields, printed in soft greens, reds and creams. Our collection holds 28 Prang prints, from holly cards to winter landscapes; three that work especially well at Christmas are below.

1. Little Girl with Holly

A girl in a red knit cap gathers holly into the hem of her grey-green cape, with snow on the ground and a cottage chimney smoking behind her. Little Girl with Holly is a warm Prang card that reads well from across a room, which makes it a good choice for an entryway or a hallway. A framed version is also available.

2. Woman Carrying Holly

A young woman in a fur wrap and a tall feathered hat carries a bunch of holly and a parcel tied with blue ribbon while snow falls around her. Woman Carrying Holly is as much a fashion plate as a Christmas card, so it suits a bedroom or a dressing area as much as a living room.

3. Girls, Flowers and Holly

Two small vignettes sit side by side: one girl holds yellow spring flowers in a meadow, the other holds holly in a snowy field. Girls Flowers and Holly is a wide, quiet piece with a lot of cream paper around the pictures, and it doesn't look out of place in February.

The illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) illustrated Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol for William Heinemann in London in 1915, as the Victorian Web bibliography of his work records. The edition mixed full-page colour plates with pen-and-ink drawings in the text, and both kinds are in our collection: 21 Rackham products in all, including six framed editions.

Rackham's plates carry Dickens's own words as captions, printed under the picture. That makes them easy to pick for a reader: you're not choosing a generic Christmas scene, you're choosing a line from the book.

4. Bob Cratchit's Slide

Under a gas lamp at dusk, a tall man in a battered top hat slides down a lane of shouting boys, one of them tugging a striped scarf across him. The caption is Dickens's: Bob Cratchit "went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve." Bob Cratchit's Slide is a cheerful plate and a good fit for a family room.

5. Laden with Toys

Children crowd two men in a panelled hallway, one carrying a wicker hamper on his shoulder, the other being pulled along by a little girl, under the caption "Laden with Christmas toys and presents." Laden with Toys is busy and warm, in beige, rose and soft green, and it holds a large size well above a sofa or a sideboard.

6. With the Pudding

Not every Rackham piece is in colour. With the Pudding is one of the book's pen-and-ink drawings: a woman in a frilled cap carries the Christmas pudding on a tray, a sprig of holly on top, her shadow thrown large on the wall behind her. In black line on cream, it sits easily in a kitchen or a dining room next to brighter prints.

Thomas Nast's Santa came out of the Civil War. His Christmas work for Harper's Weekly began on January 3, 1863, with Santa visiting Union soldiers, and his "Merry Old Santa Claus" appeared in 1881, according to the American Battlefield Trust. We hold 65 Nast prints, and our Thomas Nast Santa prints guide goes through them in detail; one that pairs well with the Prang and Rackham picks here is below.

7. To All a Good Night

Santa leans back in his sleigh with the whip raised as his reindeer race over snowy rooftops, chimneys and a church steeple under a crescent moon. The caption reads "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night." To All a Good Night is drawn in dense black cross-hatching on aged cream paper, so it works beside the soft colours of a Prang card without competing with them.

Start with the room, not the artist. A hallway or entryway is seen quickly and from a distance, so it wants one bold image: a Prang child with holly or a Nast Santa at 16×20 or larger. A kitchen or dining room suits the pen-and-ink pieces and the holly cards. A living room can take a pair or a row.

Mixing the three artists works better than you'd expect. Nast's black line, Rackham's muted watercolour and Prang's soft lithograph colours all sit on cream paper, so a Nast, a Rackham and a Prang in matching frames read as one set. If you want them to line up, order them in the same size; unframed prints come in up to ten sizes, from 5×7 to 32×40 inches.

On price: unframed prints start at CA$34.99, and eleven of our Christmas designs also have a framed edition in Black Oak or Natural Oak, from CA$84.99 in five sizes from 8×10 to 24×36 inches. Shipping is free to the US; framed prints ship to the US and Canada. Because each print is made to order, the size you pick is printed for you rather than pulled from a shelf.

Think past December, too. The winter scenes and holly cards look right through January and February, and the Rackham plates are as much about Dickens as about the holiday, so the prints that stay up longest tend to be the quieter ones.

• Vintage Christmas prints reproduce art from roughly the 1860s to the 1910s, now in the US public domain.
• Louis Prang's Boston firm made Christmas cards from the 1870s; his holly cards and winter children are the softest of the three styles.
• Arthur Rackham's 1915 A Christmas Carol gives you Dickens's scenes with his words as captions, in colour or pen and ink.
• Thomas Nast drew Santa for Harper's Weekly from 1863; mix him with Prang and Rackham in one size and frame for a matched wall.

If you'd like to see everything side by side, the full Vintage Christmas Prints collection holds 163 prints by Nast, Prang, Rackham and the Edwardian postcard artists, and you can filter by size before you choose.