Here we have a genuine relic of the American dime-museum age, a cabinet card photograph made at Rich’s studio, 95 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago, in the mid-1890s, back when the city’s West Side was a churning warren of immigrant tenements, storefront amusements, and the strange itinerant trade of the sideshow. This studio was the secret studio to all the coolness we are searching for now.
The image is a quiet stunner. A man and a woman, both of short stature, stand in their finest dress flanking an ornate sculpted pedestal, and perched dead center atop that pedestal, very much the star of the proceedings, sits a small white dog. He holds his straw boater against his chest; she trails an extravagant brocade gown with a train pooled clear across the studio floor. They are posed not as curiosities but as gentry, miniature aristocrats set against a painted backdrop of arches and swagged drapery. That was the whole art of the dime-museum portrait: it sold dignity and spectacle in the very same frame. Look closely and you’ll see the pedestal is doing double duty, lifting the little dog to chest height, a sly compositional trick that frames the performers’ stature without ever stooping to cruelty.
What makes this card more than a charming oddity is the studio behind it. Rich’s of Blue Island Avenue was no ordinary neighborhood gallery snapping christenings and wedding parties. This was a working sideshow studio, one of the small West Side operations where dime-museum performers were sent to have their souvenir and pitch cards made, Chicago’s own humbler echo of Charles Eisenmann’s famous Bowery studio in New York. The proof is in the surviving roster. Documented cabinet cards bearing the Rich’s imprint, 95 Blue Island Ave., have surfaced and sold for the following performers:
Lulu Baum, Tattooed Lady
A Tattooed Showman
Athelia, “Yucatan Aztec” Pinhead
Annie Howard, Tattooed Lady
A Circassian Snake Woman
The Woman with the Waterfalling Mane
A Snake Charmer
Little Henriette Mortez
Performer in Top Hat with Trombone (sold by yours truly)
That is an entire dime-museum bill emerging from one tiny studio: tattooed ladies, a microcephalic performer dressed in the standard exoticized patter, a Circassian “snake woman,” a long-hair act, and at least one other billed little-person performer. Our couple steps directly out of that world. They remain, for now, unidentified by name, but they keep very good company, and the hunt is half the fun.
The unusual cabinet card measures about 6 1/2" tall, and 4" wide. The antique photograph is in pretty good condition given its age. There is a slight dent in the top center and a small horizontal crease in the bottom right. Please see all pics as they are part of the description.
I ship FedEx to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO boxes). The rare cabinet card will be shipping housed in a hard sleeve. Free shipping on the unusual 19th century photograph.
A standing couple, a little white dog on a pedestal, and a vanished Chicago studio that quietly photographed the city’s sideshow underworld. That’s all the business.
