Thursday 6 December 2012

The Circus Museum, NL

(C) Circus Museum nl
More ephemera from Holland.

The Circus Museum, NL is a superb site, with a wealth of imagery. There are both Dutch and English versions.  The Foundation (housed at the Teyler Museum, Haarlem) contains the collection of Jaap Best augmented (during his lifetime) by the archives of the German acrobat and circus collector Erdwin Schirmer. This consisted largely of 3,500 chromolithographed posters of Adolph Friedländer.

Online are 8,000 posters, and 7,000 circus photographs and postcards.  Reproductions can be bought for most of them but the zoomable images are ideal for research.  Although predominantly Dutch and German, the collection is truly international, as the scroll-bar list of towns in advanced search reveals.

Searchable fields in Advanced search are Circus, Person, Designer/Photographer, Lithographer, Place, Date range and Material type, and keywords (which can be searched in English: clown, elephant, horse etc).

There is a very useful feature in Simple search: each of the main categories (Acrobatics, Animals, Clowns, Dance, Ethnographic shows, Fairgrounds, Folklore, Freaks, Jugglers, Musicians, Music and Theatre) can be further refined by its own subcategories through a second scroll-bar (e.g  Acrobats, stilt-walkers).

A very effective site, which enables complex searches of its superb collections with the minimum of fuss.


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