A silver dragon strides across an amber diagonal with its claws out, and the conjurer's name is tucked into the corner above it.
James Upton Ltd. of Birmingham lithographed the poster. William Ellsworth Robinson took on the Chung Ling Soo persona around 1900, when he took a job at the Folies Bergère in Paris and kept up the fiction of a Chinese identity for nearly two decades, performing across Britain and Europe. In 1915 he was filmed greeting First World War veterans at a benefit performance. He was killed at the Wood Green Empire when his bullet-catch illusion misfired.
The McCord Stewart Museum holds an impression of this poster (accession M2014.128.439).
On the poster
Flame motifs curl at the dragon's head and tail, and behind it the ground is solid black. In the upper-right field the billing runs in three tiers of white and coral lettering: "CHUNG LING SOO" at the top, "MARVELLOUS CHINESE" in italic below, and "CONJURER" in the largest slab-serif at the base. A circular yellow-bordered medallion at lower right holds a monochrome portrait of the performer in formal dress.
A diagonal divides the sheet from lower-left to upper-right.
About this print
A digitally restored reproduction, printed on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art paper with pigment inks.
