Salon de Magie: The Klosterman Collection Part I

Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugéne. Soirees Fantastiques. London: W.J. Goldbourne, ca. 1848. Two-color pictorial broadside for an appearance of the famed French conjurer in London at St. James’s Theatre. Bearing a vignette wood engraved image of the Ethereal Suspension. Holographic note identifies the date of the poster as 1848. Gilt wooden frame, 26 ¼ x 21 ½". Rare. Robert-Houdin introduced his Ethereal Suspension in 1847, and it quickly became a popular feature of his show. The trick was an apparent demonstration of the properties of ether, an anesthetic introduced to the public by a Boston dentist in 1846. Robert-Houdin used the smell of ether, wafted over the audience by a backstage assistant, to apparently “hypnotize” his son Eugène and then suspend him, outstretched, from the tip of a walking stick. The stage picture this created captured the imagination of his audiences immediately, and it was not long before the illusion was copied. Later, Robert-Houdin modified the effect further to make it even more remarkable, in that the walking stick on which Eugène was suspended was supported itself by a bench balanced in a precarious and apparently impossible manner. Several bills similar to the example offered here are part of the Houdini papers at Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, creating some conjecture that it was Houdini who dated the posters in blue pencil.