Knight's Lance, from the Arms of All Nations series (N3) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands 1887

Curator: The image before us, "Knight's Lance," hails from the "Arms of All Nations" series, a set of collectible cards distributed by Allen & Ginter Cigarettes in 1887. These cards, printed with colored pencil drawings, were meant to both stiffen cigarette packs and entice smokers with miniature glimpses into worldly culture and history. What is your first reaction to this work? Editor: It has a strangely romanticized feel. Knights and chivalry, once the brutal reality of power, became mythologized by this point. But knowing it's essentially an advertisement… the rosy plume and the way the knight grips his lance become kind of unsettling, commodified valor. Curator: It is interesting to view how objects and rituals lose meaning over time to become spectacle or signifiers divorced from their purpose. The lance, for example, shifts in this depiction from its status as a medieval weapon to become an element of theater. Think of tournaments, celebrations, or purely representational coats of arms and regalia. This image seeks to invoke an aura of nobility, packaged within consumerism. Editor: Right. And who gets to decide what these symbols signify? For Allen & Ginter, “knighthood” is divorced from the messy history of colonialism and class—it's been bleached of inconvenient truths. Instead, it sells a very palatable, nostalgic brand of Americana in which cigarettes become aligned with bravery and honor. Curator: Indeed, these pocket-sized pictures offer narratives that erase the inconvenient histories and instead become potent mnemonic devices of a certain constructed ideal. Even in its flatness as an image, we respond to symbols with a strong psychological certainty about the way they feel to us—it feels ennobling to smoke. Editor: But the honor isn't real. We can reclaim and repurpose those historical narratives. The symbol itself might not have any inherent meaning until we re-examine them with current knowledge. We can decode this artwork by taking into account that social inequality exists, not in spite of, but because of such seductive iconography. Curator: Looking back, I see that “Knight's Lance” reveals much about how collective memory gets reshaped, shifting icons over decades of history to influence not just artistic conventions, but consumption and cultural aspirations as well. Editor: Absolutely. Context informs everything, revealing the hidden politics behind even the seemingly innocent imagery.