1907 Valentine's Day Greeting Card with Whimsical Fantasy Characters

The proportions here are catastrophically wrong—three grotesque clown figures tower in desperation around a glowing celestial princess in white, one green-faced with a cigar dangling from its mouth, one hunched over in apparent existential despair, and one actively drowning while making sustained eye contact. All are desperately pining for the princess surrounded by exploding star-bursts who has clearly ascended to a literal higher plane of existence to escape them. The verse 'Thou, Princess, dost delight the eye / To win thy love I fain would try' is doing a lot of heavy lifting to dignify what is essentially a mob of nightmare clowns harassing a woman beyond their reach. Copyrighted 1907 by the New York Herald Co., which means someone at an actual newspaper looked at this fever dream and said: yes, this is the romantic sentiment the American public needs.