HARTZ, Joseph Michael (1836 – 1903). The Hartz Rising Skull. Circa 1880s. Papier-mâché skull owned and used by J.M. Hartz in his stage-filling routine, “A Devil of a Hat,” in which the conjurer began the performance with a bare stage holding only a few glass-topped tables, and at the conclusion took his bows amidst dozens if not hundreds of objects produced from an opera hat borrowed from a member of the audience. This skull was used at the conclusion of the routine and appears – apparently of its own volition – over the brim of the hat, due to the clockwork mechanism concealed inside the skull.
Housed in a wooden and glass display case with plush cushion and hand-lettered plaque below the skull reading, “Original Hartz Rising Skull / as used in / A Devil of a Hat.” Accompanied by a sheaf of documents and photographs related to the use and ownership of the skull (including two with its former owner, Richard Ritson), a modern (reprint) picture of Hartz’s stage set in Professor Hoffmann’s home, a VHS of the skull in operation (not tested), and with some of the documents tracing the device’s provenance from Hartz down to the collection of Dr. Edwin Dawes. A unique and important association item from the show of this influential Victorian conjurer who performed in England and America.
Professor Hoffmann wrote extensively about Hartz and his Devil of a Hat routine, and very specifically about this skull in The Wizard for Nov. 1906. Hoffmann’s story recounted the use of this mechanical device in the following manner: “His first improvement [on the productions] was the substitution for the doll [with] a human skull, which rose automatically from the hat, the performer standing at a distance from it, and taking no part whatever in the operation.” In performance, “… an uncanny grating sound called attention to the hat. Rising by slow degrees, the skull came into view….” Hoffmann went on to write an entire chapter about Hartz in the 1911 expanded edition of his seminal work, Later Magic. In its pages he wrote: “Among the many wonders of the magic art, not the least surprising is the fact that a single trick, in the hands of the same performer, should have held the stage as permanent attraction for nearly forty years. Such, however, was the case with Hartz’s great Hat Trick…. The marvel is the greater, because at the very outset the trick was not a new one, but was merely a highly improved version of one which, in a simpler form, had already been worked by magicians for half a century or more.” The production of the skull was used as a finale to the production, as Hoffmann relates in the many pages of the book devoted to his late friend and his magic. Those pages also make clear that that Hoffmann himself had a hand in the skull’s introduction to the routine: “This, as also the production of the champagne bottles, to be presently noticed, was the outcome of a suggestion of my own, made in response to Hartz’s often-repeated request to give him an idea for some striking effect, no matter how impracticable it might seem.”