Vintage Circus Posters and Ephemera

With the debut of the modern traveling circus in the early 1800s, circus posters became crucial tools for drawing crowds to what were only one or two performances per location. Many early circus advertisements were simple woodblock prints mentioning the name of the circus, the price of admission, and a few acts. Later, in the early 20th century, colorful, fanciful designs of leaping animals, laughing clowns, and gesturing ringmasters became standards on circus posters for promoters such as Hachaliah Bailey, Phineas Taylor Barnum, and brothers Albert, Augustus, Otto, Alfred, Charles, John, and Henry Ringling. Naturally, the history of circus posters parallels the fortunes and failures of these big-top showmen, but circus posters also fill a thick chapter in the history of lithography, at least in the United States. One of the biggest players in that story was the Strobridge Lithographing Company, whose roots in Cincinnati, Ohio, stretch back to 1854, when an accountant named Hines Strobridge joined a printing company called Middleton and Wallace. By 1875, the company that eventually took the Strobridge name filled three floors of a downtown Cincinnati office building, boasting more than a dozen presses (some of which were steam-powered) and printing everything from deeds of sale to banking checks. At that point, circus posters were already an important part of the company’s mix of paper products. In 1868, Strobridge had printed its first circus poster for a performer named Dan Rice, whose act consisted of convincing audiences that he could coax his horse, Excelsior, Jr., to speak—the Strobridge poster features the words “Dan Rice’s Blind Horse ‘Excelsior, Jr.’” below an image of the unsaddled steed standing in a circus tent and being admired by onlookers, with a ribbon near the horse’s head that reads “I AM BLIND. YET CAN SPEAK.” Though the colors on the Dan Rice poster are subdued, subsequent circus posters would not be, saturated with enough ink to stand up to the elements—be it sun, snow, or sleet—for a month or longer. In fact, ink was so important to Strobridge’s circus-poster business that it had a color called Strobridge Red—perhaps the most important hue in the typical circus poster—developed just for its durability. This effort paid off, and by the early 1880s, Strobridge was printing circus posters for, among others, James Bailey, a nephew of Hachaliah Bailey and partner with P.T. Barnum in the London Circus, which came to the United States in 1881. Many of the Strobridge posters from this era, including one of Bolivar—“Positively the Largest Indian Male Elephant on Exhibition in the World”—were designed by Matt Morgan, one of a succession of talented artists hired by the company. Decades later, Charles Livingston Bull left his aesthetic imprint on vintage Strobridge circus posters when, in 1928, he painted a ferocious “Leaping Tiger,” which appeared poised to escape its two-dimensional bounds and tear the viewer to ribbons with its outstretched claws. Of course, the circus names Strobridge are most closely associated with are Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the latter of which promised ticket holders the “Greatest Show on Earth.” In Strobridge’s depiction of the exhibitions offered by these companies, we see aerial trapeze artists such as The 9 Jordans and The Incomparable Clarkonians swinging in rush-hour-traffic proximity to each other; a white-faced clown in red-and-white striped leggings, tipping his conical hat as he looms, impossibly gargantuan, over acres of circus tents; an unnamed "Giant Rhinoceros" stepping from a tropical watering hole; and a scene from a Ringling Bros. production of Joan of Arc. In 1919, when the two rival circuses joined forces, Strobridge printed posters for their combined productions, too, as seen in a poster from 1924 advertising the “New Jungle Circus,” which featured a painting of eight snarling tigers and a lone black panther in a cage with a female trainer. Equally dramatic, though less perilous, is the painting from 1927 of an albino elephant descending the gangplank of an ocean liner, as some men in fedoras click photographs while others in turbans bow in supplication, all of whom are framed above a legend in blue type on a yellow background that reads “The World-Famed Sacred White Elephant, Pawah, Arriving In New York Harbor From Burma.”