Welcome to Trade Cards and Ephemera Online

The collections at Waddesdon, formed by three generations of the Rothschild family, are extraordinarily rich in a wide variety of areas. Of particular note are eighteenth-century French furniture, ceramics and painting, eighteenth-century English portraits, Dutch Golden Age painting, nineteenth-century textiles and furnishings, arms and armour, sculpture, as well as sixteenth and seventeenth-century maiolica, Limoges enamels and metalwork.

Less well known are the collections of emphemera, drawings, prints, books and medieval manuscripts. These collections are fragile and so, for conservation reasons cannot be on permanent display.

Thanks to funding received from The Leverhulme Trust we have just completed a three year research project in partnership with the University of Warwick to digitise and catalogue our collection of trade cards. This catalogue is now available online - the first area of our collections to be so presented.

Over the next couple of years, our aim is to make the majority of the collection accessible in this way, so different categories of material will continue to be added to the website as the project develops. Ultimately there will be information about some 25,000 objects. To view some highlights from the collection Click Here

Please follow the links in the lefthand column to search the trade cards catalogue.