Hercules Sägemann Advertisement

Hercules Sägemann Advertisement, Heinrich Schroeder´s Kunstanstalt Nürnberg, around 1850, Color printing.
Courtesy of Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Before the British cultivated rubber trees in Southeast Asia, natural rubber mostly came from the Amazon. In a telling contrast to the realities of rubber production, the poster shows a small indigenous family going about their work in an almost bourgeois, idyllic manner.