Parlor Kinetoscope

Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, was a prolific inventor with over 100 patents. He was one of the pioneers in developing and showing films in the 1890s. Before the Lumière brothers showed their first projected movie in 1895, Edison had opened his first Kinetoscope Parlor in New York where patrons could watch movies in a peepshow-like device. There were rows of machines and with the deposit of a coin, a motor would engage and through a viewing hole you could see the film. The Kinetoscope Parlor was an immediate success, but in less than a decade the Kinetoscope was overwhelmed by projected movies.

In 1897, Edison also patented and produced a table-top Parlor Kinetoscope to appeal to the burgeoning home entertainment market. Very few of these toys have survived through to today. I am fortunate to have one now and I have opened a whole new section on my site for Flickers which include Kinoras, Flip books, the Parlor Kinetoscope, and Mutascopes.

Magic Lantern Convention

The Magic Lantern Convention held in July in Boston was a great success. Eighty-five people, from seven countries and three continents, spent three days watching shows, listening to presentations, buying and selling items, sharing stories and meals. Although much of the convention was devoted to the magic lantern there were talks about a wide range of visual entertainments. One of the most intriguing was a talk by Jacques Prenez about seditious figures.

Another was given by an unexpected presenter, George L. Mutter, who only contacted me days before the Convention began, and shared an incredible group of 19th century stereo views to be seen with the assistance of 3-D glasses.

Still the majority of time was taken with a variety of talks and shows about the magic lantern. We learned about early lanternists in Venice, a district in Madrid where freak shows and phantasmagoria entertainment were offered, and we were treated to an in depth look at a 1890 catalogue of lantern materials produced by the Berlin firm, W. Hagedorn.

We had so many shows over the weekend. We were treated to amazing photographs of Mary Ann Auckland’s Canadian grandmother (top) and Dick Moore shared some stunning circus images (bottom).

Then there was the wonderfully creative show, The Arctic Theatre Royal (yes polar bear costumes and large windup panorama, presented by the Wonder Show from Providence. 

R.I. Mitsue Ikeda and her troupe of students, from Osaka University, treated us to a rear projection Japanese lantern show. No, no not done yet. How often do people get to attend a film premiere? We had the chance to watch the world premiere of “ A Magic Lantern Life: The Story of the American Magic Lantern Theater.

The convention was held in the midst of my collection and during breaks I showed participants different parts of my collection including an early 18thcentury magic lantern.

On top of all of this we had the dazzling display of Magic Lantern Entertainment at the Brattle theatre in Cambridge. The sold out theatre was alive with laughter, applause and audience participation during five shows on offer that evening. The night’s entertainment ended with Mervyn Heard giving a show entitled How Bill Adams Won the Battle at Waterloo. It was fun and turned history on its head.

It was decided at the end of the convention to hold the next International Convention in two years in New Orleans. There is plenty of opportunity to join the Magic Lantern Society and even get on the program in New Orleans. If you are interested in either finding out more details about the Magic Lantern Society of the U.S. and Canada or joining the Society please contact the Chairman, Ron Easterday, at president@magiclanternsociety.org

Diafanoramas

Some times it takes a while to learn what something “really” is and what its appropriate name is and even then, there are still unanswered questions. That process of discovery is one of the joys of collecting. Some ten years ago, I bought a wonderful18th century boxed set of glass views of a group of people watching a fireworks display.

I thought it was a rare set of glass peepshow views. It looked similar to paper sets of peepshow views made by the famous German printer, Martin Engelbrecht, in which a scene was printed on six different cards. When the views are placed in a peepshow box and the viewer looks at the scene through a lens, the scene appears three-dimensional and much more life-like than a flat painting, drawing or a print. I thought some type of rare peepshow would be used to view these glass transparencies. I held that view for quite a long time and even saw one or two peepshows that I thought might be used for such a purpose. I also saw a couple of exhibitions in which sets of these glass views were included and displayed in a way that gave credence to the idea that they were peepshow views.

The last few years my thinking about these incredible views began to change as I did more reading and began seeing references to things called Diaphanoramas and Diafanoramas. Some times the term Diaphanorama is applied to other sorts of visual entertainment but both terms are used when describing glass transparent views. I will use the term Diafanorama since it seems to refer exclusively to transparent glass views. This past May, when I went to Amsterdam, I learned more about Diafanoramas. There were three of them on display at the Rijksmuseum. They were set into the wall and displayed in a way that you might look at a set of peepshow views. However, Tristan Mostert, the curator of the show, told me of research that suggested that this was not how these images were viewed; in fact, these images were to be viewed as reflected in a concave mirror (often referred to in the 18th century as a burning mirror). A set of candles would be arranged behind the box to provide lighting and a concave mirror placed in front of the box, with the mirror turned toward the box. The image would be reflected in the mirror. The mirror view created a greater appearance of depth (much like the hidden mirror in the top of a vertical peepshow does). I didn’t have time while I was in Amsterdam to see the other Diafanoramas in the Rijksmuseum, but they are online. I also found there is a large collection of these views at the Rotterdam Museum, which I also visited online

Helmut Wälde has just written a very interesting article for The New Magic Lantern Journal (Vol 11, #9) on The Dutch Diafanorama. Wälde adds considerably to the existing knowledge about these glass paintings, how they were painted and what sorts of people owned them. His article focuses exclusively on Dutch examples. His research suggests a common format. Each set has four painted sheets of glass with the same measurements of width and height. I have in my collection a number of sets of transparent paintings done on two sheets of glass. Furthermore, my sets with more than two sheets of glass are different sizes, suggesting that there was not a common format.

Diafanorama seem to have begun appearing in the middle of the 18th century. They were an amusement mainly for the private entertainment of well-to-do families. There were, however, in the19th century public shows of both Diaphanoramas and Diafanoramas. I have two broadsides in my collection advertising such shows. One is a Russian broadside advertising a Diaphanorama (gallery of transparent pictures) on display in Moscow in 1834. Very recently I added another broadside advertising a 1833 Diafanorama entertainment in the city of Altenburg, Germany. The Altenburg show contained thirty different painted scenes, most of them painted by the famous Swiss painter, Franz Niklaus König. König began giving public shows of Diafanoramas in 1811. He built up a stock of different scenes and took his show on tour in the 1820s. Upon his death in 1832, Christian Stettler and a partner bought König’s collection and began making shows with the collection. This broadside advertises a show over two evenings. I hope over time to learn more about his shows. What size were the views? What size was the audience? Did the audience use a mirror to view the scenes?

Now that I am posting images and information on my collection of Difanoramas and associated broadsides, I have to decide where they belong within my web site. I considered placing them in the peepshow section.I have decided, at least for now, to put them in the Panorama/Diorama section because the Difanoramas have much in common with Diorama paintings. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre opened his first Diorama in Paris in 1822. Scenes were painted on multi-layered panels of linen, with selected parts treated to be transparent. These multi-layered paintings were on a different surface and of a very different scale but like the Diafanorama, they were a form of entertainment that made the viewing of a painting a more three dimensional experience.

Upcoming Magic Lantern Convention

“Come One! Come All!” barks the broadside advertising the upcoming evening of Magic Lantern entertainment at Cambridge’s iconic Brattle Theatre. On July 12 at 7:00 PM the doors will open and at 7:30 an evening of amazing lantern shows will unfold. Come watch images dance across the screen as lanternists use a 19^th century biunial magic lantern to create an unforgettable evening of entertainment. It is a show not to miss. Tickets are available through the Brattle Theatre at  www.brattlefilm.org

There is still time to register for the three-day convention, packed with talks, shows and demonstrations of different visual entertainments from the 18^th to the 20^th century. If interested in registering, please contact Richard Balzer at dickbalzer@gmail.com

In conjunction with the upcoming Magic Lantern convention I have decided to include more items on my site. I thought I would start with some peepshow related items. I have posted a new page of peep eggs, these small, alabaster egg-shaped souvenir viewers from the 19^th century, often sold as keepsakes at popular attractions of the day. The peep egg, with a small viewing lens, displayed between one and three pictures. Some had a single view. Others had a rotating spindle with one, two or three images, and some had images on two surfaces and “pretty colored stones” on the third. I am also posting a series of magic lantern slides in which there is a peepshow. These are some of my favorite slides. Finally I have long ignored the folding peepshow on my site. Descendants of the “Engelbrecht peep shows”, 18^th century views looked at in a box these 19^th century views are attached and fold out for your viewing pleasure.

The Magic Lantern Society of the US & Canada's 16th International Convention

The Magic Lantern Society of the US & Canada will be holding its 16^th International Convention in Boston from July 10-13^th. 

The convention will be held at the museum that houses the Richard Balzer Collection. There is a terrific program, over two and a half days, including magic lantern shows and presentations about the history of the magic lantern and other forms of visual entertainment. 

Come hear about 18^th century shows in Venice and Phantasmagoria performances in Madrid. Come learn about the great 19^th century traveling show, “Théatre Mécanique Morieux de Paris. Come learn about the Pilgrims Progress Panorama and be entertained by stories about the Great Snazelle, magician and magic-lantern showman. There will be an exhibition of magic lantern material and an auction, open to all who attend. 

There will be the world premiere of the new documentary about Magic Lantern Society member Terry Borton. The film is titled “A Magic-Lantern Life: The Story of the American Magic-Lantern Theater” and on Saturday night, there will be an evening of Magic Lantern Entertainment at the iconic Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. Starting at 7:30pm five lantern showmen will each give fifteen minutes shows. Open to the public, this will be an evening not to be missed!

For more information about convention attendance and registration please contact Richard Balzer at dickbalzer@gmail.com

A DUTCH TREAT

How many incredible things can you see in four days? Who knows but in four days in the Netherlands I saw more than I could have imagined. It started with a visit to Amsterdam’s world famous Rijksmuseum, which has been closed because of restoration work for ten years. As well as seeing some Rembrandts and Vermeers I wanted to see a recently mounted show of eighteenth century Dutch magic lantern slides and was going to be shown around by the shows curator, Tristan Mostert. Tristan proved an engaging and very knowledgeable host. He showed me through the area of the museum for special collections, where, tucked away in a small room we came upon a group of 18^th century wonders including: two bulls eye lanterns, two walls of slides, and three diafanoramas (painted glass scenes on different sheets of glass). 

Just behind us the images were being projected on a wall so visitors could not only look at the objects but also see how they would have been viewed.

When I was finally done looking at the slides Tristan asked, what else I would like to see. I asked him to show me eight of his favorite items in the museum and explain why he liked them. Tristan is a historian by training, and as we wandered around the museum he selected several pieces of historical significance, most of which I would not have noticed. By the time he explained the historical importance of the piece, what it was doing in the particular room and why he found it interesting, I was thoroughly captivated. It was one of the most enjoyable museum visits I have ever had.

The next morning I set out early and was first in line at the Van Gogh Museum. I had been warned how crowded both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh would be but both were virtually empty when they opened at nine. I had no sense of crowds until 10:30 and by then I had soaked up about as much as I could. It was a great treat. I saw many images I was familiar with and many more that I wasn’t, a wonderful way to start the day.

Next was a trip to Scheveningen to the home and museum (Nico’s Tooverlantaarnmuseum) of Henk Kranenburg. The museum is housed on the ground floor and the minute you enter you feel the warmth of the place, cabinets full of lanterns, and optical toys line the entrance hallway. Next you enter the large museum room, which is also home of the forty-seat theatre. There are prints from floor to ceiling, decorating the fourteen feet walls. At the top of the walls there are shelves full of lanterns. There is also a second level balcony where Henk generally performs his shows, surrounded by six lanterns, boxes upon boxes of slides and a sound system where he whips up the wizardry.

 Henk asked what would I like to see and I said I would love to see some of his early slides. He disappeared upstairs and began bringing down boxes.  There were a great number of 18^th century slides and among them a few stunning Musschenbroek slides. For any serious collector of magic lantern slides viewing 17^th or 18^th century slides produced by the Musschenbroek family firm of Leiden is a big treat both because of their age and their artistry. Henk asked if I’d like to see them projected. I nodded. It was such a treat to see them projected.

Later we looked at other unusual slides including an eight-part, Polytechnic-size dissolving set of slides depicting a woman’s dream of her life. In all that time we never got to slip slides, chromotropes, lever slides, and regular dissolving views. I could hardly believe it when Henk said he’d been collecting for only thirteen years. He has created an impressive collection.

Early in the evening we moved upstairs for a sumptuous lamb dinner prepared by Henk’s partner Robert te Pas. After dinner I took the tram and train back to Amsterdam. It had been a wonderful day.

The next morning I set off by tram & train to Zeist where I was met by Margreet Wagenaar. I met Margreet and her husband, Willem Albert, who died in 2011, thirty years ago and last visited their home 20 years ago. Willem Albert was one of the great magic lantern showmen and after many years taking his show on the road built a theatre in his house.

Margreet had planned the entire day. Her daughter, Elisabeth, was only available for a couple of hours to project some slides and she soon arrived with her own son. I said I’d fancy seeing some of their Musschenbroek slides and what Elisabeth fetched from the attic was truly staggering. Elisabeth projected a large number of amazing slides over the next hour.

 We paused for lunch and then Margreet drove me to Utrecht. We were met by her son, Joost (who I first met when he was a teenager). He is now a judge in Utrecht. He was kind enough to take us on a walking tour of the architecturally rich city.

Margreet and I returned to her house and headed up to the attic, passing the study that is home to one of the few known Musschenbroek lanterns, and a beautiful eighteenth century peepshow before making our way up the stairs to the attic so I could dive into the shelves and shelves of slides. I almost never tire when looking at slides but it was all too much. After an hour and half I knew I had reached my visual limit. I had begun to stare at the vast shelves holding thousands of more images.

Soon we were off for Kortenhoef to see Annet Duller’s magic lantern show to be held in the barn onthe land of her cousin, Pieter Dekker. The barn is generally used for the restoration of antique, flat-bottomed fishing boats but it proved to be a wonderful site for a magic lantern show.  The area nearest the large green doors leading into the barn was turned into a receiving hall with food and drinks laid out. Beyond that, a larger space bordered by the thick-planked walls held sixty chairs,  arranged in front of a white muslin screen stretched across poles.  An English biunnial lantern sat in the middle of the audience. Annet, a natural storyteller, held everyone's interest with her slides and her stories. The room was full of oh and ahs as well as laughter greeting her stories. It was a great end to a great day.

My last day was a change of pace. I wasn’t going to see another magic lantern collection. Instead I was going to spend the day with an old friend, Ruud Hoff, who had moved out of Amsterdam several years ago. He drove down from Friesland to pick me up and drive me back up to see his partner, Dian, and their home in Pietersbierium.  On our way out of Amsterdam we passed by a concert hall featuring a huge mesmerizing photograph of Nelson Mandela plastered across its side. I told Ruud I’d like to stop and get a picture. He kept driving saying he was the person who took that picture June 16, 1990 during Mandela’s first trip out of South Africa as a free man and would show me the original at his house.

We drove for more than an hour and half until the landscape flattened out.  We left the highway and passed through a series of small towns. Franeker was one of the towns where we stopped to visit the world’s oldest working planetarium. The one room planetarium was the work of Eise Eisinga, who completed his living room planetarium in 1781. We walked into the living room and looked up to the ceiling to be greeted by celestial skies. It was utterly amazing, not only because it was it an accurate depiction of the known planetary system, but because it also represented an accurate system for keeping track of the calendar and time.

After that we went back to Ruud’s. Ruud is a collector and showed me around his collection of Kodak cameras. The day and evening passed quickly and at about 9pm he drove me back to Amsterdam. I thanked him for the day and watched as he left me for the long drive back home.

By the time I walked down the three flights of stairs in the building at which I was staying, got back on the tram and headed out to Schiphol Airport, I was tired. Not only was my mind full of happy 

memories but my hands were clutching a few 18^th century slides including a Musschenbroek lever slide.

I have just put a page of 18^th century slides up on my site.

The Collection has a tumblr!

We're delighted to introduce our tumblr as another way to enjoy the collection.

New animated gifs are added every monday evening.

Fantasmagorie

In my last post I wrote about ghost projection and mentioned the great fascination at the turn of the 19^th century with a particular type of magic lantern entertainment that called up apparitions. In England, the shows were called Phantasmagoria and in France Fantasmagorie. I was incredibly lucky to recently find this fabulous small broadside (6” x 9”) c.1799 advertising Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Fantasmagorie show held in the Convent des Capucines. Robertson’s shows were a great success, starting with his first show in Paris in 1798. At the end of 1798 he moved to more spacious and atmospheric quarters in the Convent. He gave his first show there on January 3,1799 and continued at that location until 1803.

The broadside cleverly contains the visual power of a striking wood engraving and bold

text proclaiming a show that will produce Apparitions, Specters of Phantoms and Ghosts. What’s more, the assembled patrons will witness, as the broadside proclaims, “experiments with the new fluid know by the name of Galvinism whose application gives temporary movement to bodies whose life has departed.” (This was based on the work of the Italian physician, Luigi Galvani who applied electrical current to frog’s legs, which seemed to stir life in dead frog).

Robertson’s patrons entered the convent and moved through rooms where they might see the experiment in Galvinism, peepshows and optical illusions before being seated in a darkened room. They must have been startled when images appeared as from nowhere onto the screen. Often these figures would not only get larger but they would seem to leave the screen. The lanternist and lantern were hidden from view behind the screen. The lanternist could make the image increase in size by moving the lantern, which was on rails, further back from the screen. Music added to the effect and Robertson employed the Franklin Harmonica. Benjamin Franklin invented a form of the glass harmonica, a musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls of various sizes and musical tones are made by means of friction. The glass harmonica produces an eerie piercing sound which you can feel in your chest and must have helped create just the right atmosphere for the spectral images appearing on the screen.

For more information on the history of the Fantasmagorie read Laurent Mannoni’s excellent book: The Great Art Of Light and Shadow 

Ghost Projection

A year ago I made a post about Pepper’s Ghost.  It began with, “Who has not been scared and at the same time excited by a ghost story or the inexplicable appearance of an apparition. Fascination with ghosts and the afterworld have gripped audiences for centuries. Our appetite for such titillation seems insatiable. Ghost shows are nothing new. Writers, magicians, and lanternists have long used the popular fascination with ghosts and apparitions for their advantage. From its earliest inception the magic lantern has employed ghost figures to frighten and to entertain audiences. Some of the very earliest magic lantern images in the last part of the 17^th century were of ghosts and demons.  Calling forth such figures reached a new height in the late 1700s and early 1800s largely due to two showmen and their shows. The Fantasmagorie shows, popularized by Belgian showman Éttiene-Gaspard Robertson  and the Phantasmagoria shows of magician Paul de Philipsthal, called forth apparitions onto the screen. Their shows ingeniously employed rear projection. The lanternist was hidden from the audience behind the screen. In a darkened room the images would appear on the screen as if from nowhere. By moving the lantern, the figure could be made smaller or larger such that the ghosts would appear and then menacingly approach the audience.”   

A recent purchase of the book Aufschlüsse zur Magie aus geprüften Erfahrungen über verborgene philosophische Wissenschaften und verdeckte Geheimnisse der Natur (1790) by the German writer Karl von Eckartshausen has brought me back to the idea of the appearance of phantoms and ghosts. Eckartshausen wrote about a wide range of topics including alchemy, mysticism, and magic. In this book he describes how to create a ghost illusion and the first print illustrates the ghost figure hovering over a pedestal. The second illustrates how Eckartshausen employed a hidden magic lantern to project an image off a mirror to create the effect.

I can’t resist including two more engravings from Eckharsthausen’s book although they are not of a ghost projection, but rather of what must have been a remarkable trick. Eckhartshausen would, he states, take someone for an evening stroll and at some point would turn toward a wall and mysteriously and probably frighteningly, a figure would appear on the wall.  The print illustrates the trick at the moment of the projection. The other engraving shows the lantern that was employed and was hidden under his coat. You can see the ingenious plunger used to extinguish the light and the carrying stick used to light the lantern. If it actually worked it must have been wonderful.

 Now back to the tale of ghost projection. Éttiene-Gaspard Robertson certainly was aware of the work of Eckartshausen and created his own ghost effects. The image below is the frontispiece from Robertson’s Mémoires Récréatifs, Scientifiques Et Anecdotiques (1831) and shows the impact of the appearance of apparitions on an audience.  The second illustration from a book published in 1811 shows a ghost projection with the lanternist hidden behind the screen.

For at least a half-century following the Robertson’s first shows the Phantasmagoria was a big part of lantern entertainment. The two broadsides, one for a German shows, another for a Russian show illustrate the spread of these entertainments.

Those wanting to learn more about ghost shows and Phantasmagoria entertainment should read Mervyn Heard’s book Phantasmagoria, The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern.

I have put a number of prints and broadsides relating to the Phantasmagoria on my web site. 

Joseph Boggs Beale

Joseph Boggs Beale’s artistic work might not have seemed significant to me were it not for the fact that a large part of his career was spent in the employ of the firm of C.W. Briggs (lantern slide makers) producing drawings to be reproduced as lantern slides. I had a number of Beale slides but only one of his drawings, a romanticized scene seemingly extolling the virtues of capitalism with a prosperous boss and his busy workers. I had the lantern slide produced from the drawing and I liked having both the original drawing and the slide. I did not know until last year when I had the opportunity to buy some other Beale drawings that this drawing was from a temperance series called “A Drunkard’s Reform”. The drawing was not meant, as I had formerly imagined, to be about the rewards of capitalism but rather the return to honest labor and promotion to foreman of a man almost ruined by drink. I have grown in my appreciation of Beale’s work and been fortunate enough to add several pieces to my collection in the last two years.

Who was Joseph Boggs Beale (1841-1926)?  He was, a largely unremembered Philadelphia artist who worked in the last half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.  He worked for a variety of publications including Frank Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, and the Daily Graphic before going on to work for C.W. Briggs. Between 1881-1915 he made more than 2000 drawings which were reproduced as magic lantern slides. His drawings, and the slides that were produced from them, covered an amazingly wide view of American life. His work included Bible Stories, Popular Literature, History, Temperance, Folk Tales and Comic Scenes.  A partial list of his work would include Pilgrim’s Progress, Marley’s Ghost, Paul Revere’s Ride, The Life of Lincoln, Yankee Doodle, The Star Spangled Banner The Raven, Hiawatha, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas.

In 1940 Life magazine did a piece on Beale that served to mark a slight resurgence of interest in his work. The article referred to Beale as America’s foremost magic lantern painter, not that there was much competition or recognition for such a title. Terry Borton, the proprietor of the American Magic-Lantern Theater, has for the past twenty years tirelessly promoted Beale’s work and used slides based on Beale’s drawings for his magic lantern shows. Terry and his wife Debbie have finished the manuscript of a soon to be published book about Beale and his work entitled Before The Movies which will undoubtedly add greatly to the awareness of Beale as an artist of American life and history.

Although Beale worked well into the 20th century his artistic style is firmly planted in the 19th century with a kind of heroic grandiosity and unbridled optimism.  Some of Beale’s drawings seem overly sweet and others sadly capture a stereotyping common at the end of the 19th century. The best of Beale’s drawings catch grand figures  caught in melodramatic moments and are packed with detail. They are worth a look and my collection of Beale material is now up on my site.

New Praxinoscope Animations

Since I've started working with Dick on his collection, some of my favorite pieces to study and work with have been Praxinoscope strips. As you can see in this animated set, the images are impressively rendered, and the actions are both charming and convincing in their motion. These strips were produced by artists who had none of the technological conveniences of a modern animator such as myself. I am constantly amazed by the refined technique that can be found in these works of art that predate the likes of Winsor McCay and Walt Disney by several decades.

You can find these praxinoscopes and many others on the collection website.

The Eidophusikon

MOVING PICTURES proclaimed this 1786 broadside and what an extraordinary entertainment the Eidophusikon must have been. It predated the most famous moving pictures, the movies, by more than 100 years.  Everything about the show was intended to challenge how a picture was viewed. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, the creator of the Eidophusikon, was an accomplished French painter who at the age of thirty-one moved to London in 1771. Soon after his arrival he took a job working as a scene designer for David Garrick at the Drury Lane theatre. He made quite a name for himself for the life-like scenes he created and would master many techniques in the art of stage design and lighting that he would employ when he opened the doors for the Eidophusikon (Greek for images of nature) on February 26,1781 at his home on Lisle Street.

An evening’s entertainment consisted of as many as five tableaux, each cleverly combining a familiar scene or place with a dramatic moment. His first shows included a London View with an aurora effect, a view of Naples with a sunset and concluded with a storm at sea. The entertainment was held in one of the lushly decorated parlour rooms that could accommodate 130 people.  There is only one known image of this space, a watercolor by Edward Burney showing the interior of the room before the show. There is a bench with a couple of patrons sitting and others standing around.

At the front of the room there was what can best be described as either a very large picture, or a miniature stage. The framed picture was ten feet wide and six feet high. Unlike other pictures however the opening had a depth of eight feet “setting the stage” for a very different sort of picture. The audience sat facing the picture, then the lights would be dimmed, the show would begin and the scene would appear to come to life. With the artful use of lighting nightfall would appear as the sun slowly faded, or the brilliance of an aurora would light up the painted sky and possibly most powerfully an ominous sky would darken, foretelling an oncoming storm, soon to be joined by the appearance of lightning, accompanied by the sound of thunder, and a three dimensional mechanically controlled ship built to scale would glide across the picture sailing into a distance created by painting on several different panels. 

It all must have been quite magical. There had been other attempts to change how pictures were viewed in the eighteenth century.  The peepshow employed many of them. Martin Engelbrecht executed large numbers of views-scenes created on multiple layers of paper- to be viewed in parlour peepshows which attempted to make a scene more life-like by creating depth. Viewers of large public square peepshows often saw pin-pricked pictures, which in candlelight gave the appearance of a day scene transforming to night. There were even hand-painted scenes on multiple layers of glass created to entertain viewers and create a multi-dimensional painting. Yet none had movement and all were limited to the constraints of the size of the peepshow box.

 Loutherbourg employed the wide array of skills he had successfully used in the theatre as painter, set designer, lighting expert, creator of mechanical moving figures in creating his Eidophusikon. He opened the peepshow box, created room behind and on the side of the picture opening, so that he could manipulate what was seen and bring a mixture of lighting, movement, sound and painting together to create a very new and different form of entertainment. Part of Loutherbourg’s genius was to create a shared space where a larger group could seemingly enter a picture and experience the scene.  His choice of how large to make his “screen” was an interesting one. He clearly didn’t want to replicate a theatre, an experience the public already knew. He chose instead two dimensional pictures to see if he could create a new experience when viewing a picture.

This remarkable show closed at Lisle Street after less than two years. It did, however, reappear numerous times in different places. The next appearance was in 1786 at rooms on Exeter Exchange with increased seating for 200 people. Three years later another form of moving pictures, the Panorama, would take London by a storm.

Two Additions

Part of the fun of collecting are the stories that accompany both things found, and, the agonizing stories of things that got away. I’ve heard countless tales about a wonderful item missed, often by a matter of a few minutes or even seconds at a flea market, an antique show and, these days, on ebay. Most collector have regrets about passing on something because the price was too high or can recall something missed because a dealer who said he would hold an item did not.  Then there are stories about things a collector would love to have in his or her collection but never had an opportunity to buy. I have heard all these stories and have plenty of my own. It is a great pleasure that two striking images, one a print, the other a poster that I have long wanted and which have somehow avoided me, have recently come into my collection.

A few years after I began collecting, more than thirty years ago, I was visiting Clignancourt, the huge Paris flea market, with my friend and fellow collector, Jean-Philippe Salier and I remember first seeing Jules Chéret’s terrific poster of the Musée Grevin (the wax museum), where Emile Reynaud in 1888 first showed his Pantomimes Lumineuses -animated sequences.  Animated sequences is hardly an adequate term to describe these wonderful shows during which his hand-painted images would flicker and move on a screen for up to fifteen minutes.  This was seven years before the Lumière brothers would show their first movies. Reynaud employed something he called the Théâtre Optique to create the projection. Hidden from the audience behind the screen, this bulky equipment employed among other things both a very large praxinoscope and a magic lantern and served Reynaud well as he created his magic.

I thought the poster was quite beautiful but priced at $1,500, it was well beyond my budget. Over the next ten years I visited Clignancourt many times on “hunting trips” with Jean-Phillipe and occasionally we saw a copy of the Chéret poster. I kept repeating that if I ever saw it for $1,000 I would buy it, but that never happened and when I was prepared to pay a little more the price had gone up further. A few years ago a French dealer offered me a copy for the incredible price of 6,000 euros. I offered 3,000 and he laughed. I figured I probably would never own a copy and yet a few months ago I was amazed to have finally bought a copy at auction for $1,000. Sadly Jean-Philippe is no longer alive yet he remains the first person with whom I wanted to share the story of finally landing the elusive poster.

It is a wonderful piece. Jules Chéret, was one of France’s master poster designers and a mentor to Toulouse-Lautrec and others. He produced a series of stunning posters. I have no idea why the price for this particular poster was so much more reasonable. It could be because right on the woman’s dress there is a stamp. It is a tax stamp and in Paris at the time such posters were made, a stamp tax had to be paid before the poster could be put up.  Some buyers might have found the stamp’s placement aesthetically unattractive. It didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked it because it showed this was a poster that was actually used. 

If the Chéret poster was an object I didn’t own because I thought I couldn’t afford it, then the print of The Bartholomew Fair Fan was a print I had long wanted but had never had seen for sale and had never been offered. I long knew of it and had seen copies in many collections. I was envious that my friend, Ricky Jay, had two versions and the image graces the cover of his book Jay's Journal of Anomalies. When I was preparing my book on peepshow images I used a picture of the print from a book. I bought this print recently and wasn’t at all bothered by its overall condition-not great- or the fact that part of one of the fair’s visitor’s faces was now a small hole.

Bartholomew Fair, like Southwick Fair, was one of many London annual fairs that were particularly popular in the 18^th century.  In 1824 the London firm of J. F Setchel produced a print of a view of Bartholomew Fair in 1721. The British Museum not only has three versions of the print, both black and white and hand colored, but also the original study drawing made by an unknown source around 1730. The original design was intended to produce a fan that would be given away as a souvenir to those who the fair. 

The fan is chocker block with people, food sellers and booths. For me the fan is particularly interesting because of the large-scale peepshow depicted in the lower left had corner showing the Siege of Gibraltar.  Gibraltar was under siege several times in the 18^th century and this could represent the Spanish attack on the British garrison in 1727.  This print is also sought after by magic collectors, for whom the primary interest is the depiction of Isaac Fawkes’ booth. Fawkes was probably the most famous conjurer of the 18^th century. However Fawkes had already stopped working the Bartholomew Fair by 1721. Possibly it could be a depiction of his son, but more likely it is the elder Fawkes who was far more celebrated. Take a look. There’s a lot to see in the print.