LAUSR

For much of its history, the fleeting art of the circus performance has relied upon fixed images to disseminate information to its contemporaries and, ultimately, to record its history for the future. Images of circus have been desirable collectibles from the very beginning, with etchings of Philip Astley’s amphitheater available by 1770, only two years after the first performances that marked the birth of the modern circus. In the early nineteenth century, equestrian Andrew Ducrow’s feats on horseback and clown Joseph Grimaldi’s pantomimes were routinely illustrated in popular prints. The interest in freezing these entertainments in time through two dimensional images extended throughout all levels of society. In the middle of a tremendously successful tour of England in 1839, American lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh was painted by artist Edwin Landseer. Having witnessed the extraordinary bravery of Van Amburgh, who is often credited with being the first to place his head into the jaws of a lion, no other than Queen Victoria commissioned Landseer to paint the image of the animal trainer in a cage with his lions and tigers. The painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy, quickly was translated into an etching for more wide scale distribution (Figure 1). Despite the popularity of prints in the nineteenth century, the images were removed from the visceral reality of the performance. The artist’s interpretation of a scene, etchings and other illustrated prints arguably lack the spontaneity and the extraordinary ‘realness’ of the circus performance. The desire to emotionally connect with a place or experience through pictures, which drove the nineteenth century effort to capture permanent images by exposing chemically treated surfaces to light, spanned the first half of the 19 century. The year of Van Amburgh’s marvelous portrait reclining with his lions, 1839, would also prove to be a turning point in the development of photography, with Louis Daguerre’s self-named process to fix highly detailed images onto sheets of silver-plated copper as well as Hippolyte Bayard’s exhibition of his own prints, the first public showing of this new art. The new technology became more commercially viable with the invention of the dry collodion process in the mid-1860s. The result and the generations of photos to follow are of extraordinary value to the study of the history of the circus. Seventy years ago the Circus Museum was founded at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. The museum complex was already home to an outstanding art museum and the historic home of its founders, but the museum’s first