Magician Pulling Roses Out of Top Hat Surrounded by Supernatural Beings - Calvert Lithograph Co Art Print

This vintage magic poster left the Calvert Litho Co. presses in Detroit in 1892. In its chromolithograph glow, a magician pulling roses out of a top hat tips the silk brim and lets coral and blush blooms pour toward the footlights. He is bald and narrow-eyed. His waxed mustache and pointed goatee borrow the Mephistopheles look Alexander Herrmann made famous on Gilded Age stages.

The tailcoat opens on an oxblood lining, and its collar climbs past his ears in soot-black spikes. Behind him glows a flat slab of apricot light. Each tone was drawn in greasy crayon on its own limestone block, so every petal still carries the grain of the stone.

Then the supernatural beings crowd in. A cinnabar imp crouches at stage right and flicks aces across the floor, one ivory die tumbling after them. Bats ride the smoke. By his elbow an Aladdin lamp burns on a grinning skull, a memento mori working as stage furniture. Its bistre smoke lifts three bats toward the rafters. Above him a witch on a broomstick cuts past a sickle moon in petrol-blue dark, and beneath her a brick-red devil deals playing cards onto the boards.

Victorian stage magic sold its flowers with brimstone waiting in the wings. Spiritualism had filled American parlors with table-rapping, and sleight of hand answered from the stage. Here and now, the magician's hat is still pouring secrets.