homeware By Karyn Sparks
Daring young men on the flying trapeze, equestriennes in sparkly leotards, roaring lions or slightly creepy clowns? Whatever your ideas about circus, the magical allure of this ancient art form has captured imaginations for centuries HINKING OF RUNNING AWAY to join the circus? Be prepared for hard work and punishing schedules then – performers have to train like athletes and then pack up and move on to the next town. Easier, and more fun, is to concentrate on the glamour part of Big Top life, and enjoy your circus performance through the medium of the colourful posters that have lured in generations of awestruck punters. There are still opportunities in the market too. Amazingly, buyers passed up the chance to snap up a magnificent 125-year-old collection of rare posters for “The Greatest
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Show on Earth” in America last November, estimated to make £20,000, so perhaps we’ll get a second chance! One 13-foot-long billboard poster made up of 12 sheets dates from 1890, while James Teddy ‘The Human Aeroplane’ was the star attraction in 1916, with the poster showing the champion jumper performing “unparalleled feats at lofty heights”! All five posters were advertising the world-renowned Barnum & Bailey circus, which began in America as “P T Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome” and wowed crowds all over the globe in the last quarter of the 19th century and early years of the 20th.
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But Barnum & Bailey was by no means the start of circus – nor was it always about a Big Top full of entertaining acts. We need to go back deep into the Ancient World for the origins of circus and travelling shows of clowns, acrobats and trained animals. BREAD AND CIRCUSES The Romans loved a show – between 50,000 and 80,000 of them would turn up to the Coliseum for instance, to watch gladiators, mock sea battles and even the odd dramatised execution – a kind of early snuff movie. “Two things only the people anxiously desire – bread and circuses,”
sniffed the Roman poet Juvenal, possibly because it was the only public event that men and women could attend together! In round or oval arenas, tiered seating gave everyone a good view of horse and chariot races, and there were also trained exotic animals, and jugglers to keep the audiences amused between the main events. After the fall of the Roman Empire, these showmen went on the road, performing in towns and at local festivals. Often associated with the travelling communities of Romanies, the circus tradition was thus kept alive into the modern world. Continued on page 36
Left to right: 1940s American Circus Lion poster (145 x 104cm) for sale £192. 1950s American Circus Clown (152 x 102 cm) £288. 1940s American Circus Elephant, Acrobat, and Clown (145 x 104cm) £192. 1940s American Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus - Elephant (74 x 58cm) £85. Above: 1910 American Stock Tent Exterior ’Main Entrance’ (58 x 104cm) £192. All posters are available to buy from: www.chisholm-poster.com www.vintagexplorer.co.uk
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Above: 1960s Czech poster for a 1963 Polish film - ‘Dum Bez Oken’ - The Impossible Goodbye (41 x 28cm) for sale £90. 1960s Russian poster ‘The Vladimir Zamotkin Acrobats’ (84 x 56cm) for sale £160. Available to buy from: www.chisholm-poster.com (UK postage £32). Below right: Billy Smart’s final poster from 1971, made by W E Berry’s of Bradford
Continued from page 33 But it was a Brit who is credited with creating the modern circus. Philip Astley was an equestrian teacher whose trick riding skills won him pupils, but also wowed the crowds in the late 18th century. The London Amphitheatre (not “circus”) that he opened featured in the works of both Jane Austen and Dickens. Astley set the pattern by adding clowns, tightrope walkers and performing dogs to his equestrian performers. It was Astley, too, who discovered that a circular arena of 42 feet was ideal for trick riding since the centrifugal force helped riders stand upright – and that has remained the international standard for circus rings ever since. Hippodromes (hippo is the Greek name for horse;;) popped up in large cities across Britain in the 19th century, designed to host circus, menagerie, and theatre, sometimes with wild animals such as lions and elephants. But it was in the wilds of America, where cities were few and far between, that Joshuah Purdy Brown came up with the idea of carrying a large canvas tent with you. That was in the early 19th century, though it was the coming of the railroad that really opened up the North American continent for the travelling show. (You must remember the circus train from Dumbo!) European circus pioneers included Italian Giuseppe Chiarini and Frenchmen Jacques Tourniaire and Louis Soullier. Soullier was the first to present Chinese acrobatics into Europe, while Tourniaire introduced circus to Russia – where it became so popular that in 1919 the Communist government established a state university devoted to circus arts, specifically gymnastics, for use in circuses. Russian circus started to tour internationally from the 1950s, significantly influencing the development of contemporary circuses. Then, as concerns about the use of performing animals grew, circus saw some tough times, until it was reborn for the modern era as a display of astonishing, death-defying human skills.ve 36 / August-September 2015 / ve
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T he Circus Master Dutchman Jaap Best (1912-2002) loved the circus ever since the age of seven, when a couple of circuses pitched their tents in his home town of Alkmaar. Thereafter he went to all the performances he could, got a job in a variety of circuses (albeit on the clerical and administration side), became an authoritative circus historian and amassed a huge collection of 8,000 vintage circus posters from across Europe and America. You can view this wonderful collection online through the Circus Museum database www.circusmuseum.nl/eng, where there are old news clippings of the British royal family visit to Philip Astley’s Amphitheatre for instance, as well as more modern British names such as Bertram Mills and Chipperfield. Most items in the collection, though, conjure up far-flung circuses, with acts we never got to see. Some of the finest posters in the collection are colour lithograph posters from the archives of Adolph Friedländer, a Hamburg printing company, which were acquired by Best in 1964 on the death of German acrobat and circus collector Erdwin Schirmer. And because the museum has duplicates of several of the posters, some are even for sale! It’s also possible to order reproduction prints of all the items in Best’s collection.
Left: If you’ve always fancied a creepy clown on your wall, now you can for very little cost. This A2-height reproduction poster of a clown from 1913 costs a little under 40 euros, plus postage Below: ‘Horses, Circus Carl Hagenbeck’. This original 1920s poster from the Jaap Best Collection was printed by highly regarded German lithographer Adolph Friedländer. It’s in good to excellent condition, and measures 71cm x 95cm – it can be yours for a very reasonable 950 euros (£670)!
Original poster from the Jaap Best Collection ‘Frohn’s educated Sea-Lions Circus Miehe’ produced in 1914 and printed by Adolph Friedländer, is in two parts, and measures 139 cm x 47 cm, priced at 3,000 euros (£2,110) www.vintagexplorer.co.uk
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