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European "Porcelain" Trade Cards from the 1840's

Intricately designed early trade cards from Europe, printed using new technology with colored inks (and sometimes hand-coloring), mostly in Belgium. The "porcelain" on the cards refers to the printing finish, and has been the subject of some recent study. See, for example, J. Raman Spectroscopy, V. 39 #8 where we find "Porcelain cards are a special type of cards, which are typical of the 19th century. They are produced by a lithographic procedure, and painted by hand. In this work, direct non-destructive Raman spectroscopy is used to analyse the pigments that were used". The cards in this set were offered on eBay in 2006 by Fabien Marchand, who has now published a CD-ROM collecting images of 600 of them.