Florida’s Ringling Museum to display rare, vintage circus banners

Back in the day, circuses relied on banners -- sometimes paper, sometimes canvas -- to advertise their acts as they moved from town to town. Now four European banners painted around the turn of the last century will go on display at a Florida museum.

The 9-by-9½-foot hand-painted canvases weren’t considered “art” when they were created by Belgian designer Frans de Vos around 1900. They show early trapeze artists, a woman juggler on a ladder, acrobat clowns and other performers.

The banners have been painstakingly restored on and off for the last seven years by Artex art preservationists and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota and will go on display starting Nov. 7.

Why the big effort? For one thing, few of these still exist.

“They’re very charming,” museum chief conservator Barbara Ramsay says. “They capture a period in time in terms of the costumes and the way they’ve been painted. There aren’t many examples that have survived.”

Ramsay says these canvases had been mounted on wood and placed at the entrance to circus tents or used as backdrops inside. Grime, stains and tears on the canvases were a testament to their frequent use. Holes that had been roughly patched by circus workers as quick repairs posed a challenge to conservators: leave them in or remove them?

In the end the stitches were removed, Ramsay says, largely because they caused pulls and creases in the banners. However the team was careful to leave in signs of wear and use that are considered part of their history.

“We spent a lot of time preserving and restoring these works, but we didn’t want them to look like they were just painted,” Ramsay says.

The banners will be on display through March 29. The Ringling Museum of Art is on a complex that includes the Circus Museum, an education center, gardens, a theater and Ca’ D’ Zan, the Venetian-style estate where John Ringling, one of the original brothers, and his wife, Mable, lived.

Info: Ringling Museum of Art