The Painted Backdrop: Interiors

Backdrops painted with interiors were quite common in the nineteenth century, when indoor photography required long exposure times incompatibility with portraiture, although by the early twentieth century higher speed film and dry plates, as well as the start of flash, left this practice anachronistic. When you see a painted backdrop from after 1920 it's usually from a studio in a small town (example), or, well, in these postcards. I'm not sure why these painted backdrops were used so frequently in these postcards, when they were so out-of-date generally, but I suspect it was a part of the fantasy/unreality nature of the cards.