Everything About the Circus Was Thrown Away Except the Posters

🎪 The American circus arrived in a town for one day and left overnight. The tents were canvas, the wagons were sold or burned, the animals died, and the show itself existed for three hours and then went on a train. What survives is the advertising. Ninety-three of the images in this film are posters. 🖨️ They are chromolithographs. An image is drawn with a greasy crayon onto a slab of Bavarian limestone, because grease and water do not mix. That gives you one colour. A good circus poster used twelve, sixteen, sometimes more than twenty stones, each one drawn by hand in reverse by an artist holding in his head what his colour would do once the other fifteen were on top of it. None of them signed the work. And the posters were made to be destroyed: glued to barns and fences and left out in the weather for weeks. The date and the town were printed separately as a paper strip and pasted along the bottom, which is why so many survive with no date on them. 🐘 The film also covers what was actually being sold, including the parts that read very differently now: the menagerie, which for most Americans in 1890 was the only chance they would ever have to see an elephant, and the sideshow, which exhibited people. It covers P.T. Barnum, who came to the circus at sixty from a career in advertising. And it ends in Hartford in July 1944, with a tent waterproofed in paraffin dissolved in petrol. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph or print. Nothing is recreated. BRONNEN 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. HASHTAGS #circus #posterart #history #lithography #archivephotography