Painted Cabinet Photograph of Gus Wagner Tattooing St. George and the Dragon

Depicting legendary tattoo artist and performer Gus Wagner (1872-1941) tattooing St. George and the Dragon on the back of friend and client Ed Miller. A cropped version of this photograph appears in Gus Wagner's photo scrapbook at South Street Seaport Museum, which indicates it was taken Christmas day in Chicago in 1903. It may have been taken at Clark & Snow's dime museum, where Maud and her sister were performing. Unknown photographer, Chicago, Illinois, 1903. Albumen print with painted embellishment on card mount.

Gus Wagner embellished the photographs with tiny hand-painted tattoos over the original designs, a technique he is known to have employed on other images he owned, including several examples at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City.

Provenance: This photograph is among a small group of images gifted by Gus Wagner to his friend and client Ed Miller, who received a body suit from Wagner in 1902.

Gus and Maud Wagner: Pioneering Artists & Performers

America's early professional tattoo artists were, by nature and necessity, freewheeling, versatile beings who found promise and profit on the edges of conventional society. For sheer style, appetite for life and creative power, though, none matched August "Gus" Wagner, the son of a Midwestern immigrant farmer whose restless genius led him to channel his experiences as a world traveler into fantastical art and homemade spectacle. Billing himself as World Champion Hand Tattoo Artist and Globe Trotter, Gus used his talents as a tattoo artist, sideshow performer, taxidermist, artist, curio collector and dealer, and exhibitor of exotic animals to burnish and support his stage persona. With his wife and fellow trailblazer Maud Stevens, Gus Wagner helped define American itinerant showmanship and popular entertainment in turn-of-the-century America.

Gus Wagner understood his life as one of significance, documented it extensively, and kept the vast creative output he termed his "carvings and curios." We are the beneficiaries of Wagner's foresight—and, even more so—of collectors Rhett and Kelly Johnson's decades of dedication to preserving Wagner's best and most personal art: fabricated sea creatures, totems, "cannibal" drums, bizarre stringed instruments, carved and painted skeletons and devils, and other works of protean creativity and imagination. The Johnson collection forms the heart of the finest assemblage of photographs, artwork, ephemera and Wagner-related relics ever offered to the public.

August "Gus" Wagner was born in Marietta, Ohio in 1872, one of Jacob and Charlotte Wagner's six children. In 1896, at age 28, he made his way to the Pacific Northwest to explore the last of North America's dwindling frontier. In Alaska he encountered the monumental carved totem poles of the region's indigenous tribes, whose stylized animal and spirit masks inspired Gus's art throughout his life. He traveled to the East Coast that winter, and launched himself on a protracted period of world travel. In February of 1897, Gus boarded the cargo steamer Bellona in Newport News, Virginia, bound for Rotterdam. For the next four years Gus financed and fed his wanderlust, working as a fireman on commercial steamships plying the routes between ports all over the world. Gus logged his travels in a colossal leatherbound, hand-embossed scrapbook of memorabilia now housed at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.1

In the world's major port cities and remote outposts, Gus found fuel for his fascination with tattooing and its links to indigenous art. In London he encountered the work of Alfred South; in Sydney, Australia John Bennell enhanced and expanded Gus's own growing suit of tattoos. Gus claimed to have also learned from tattoo masters in Japan, Java and Borneo. These assertions are difficult to prove, but Gus certainly possessed the curiosity and self-confidence needed for such a feat. Annotated clippings in his scrapbook also suggest some truth behind these claims.2

While in New Zealand Gus visited with the Maori; he observed Zulu tribespeople in Africa. He accumulated information and drew inspiration from the customs and art of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Philippines, and from the cultures of China, Cuba and the Middle East. All found its way into his enormous scrapbook—and onto his increasingly illustrated body, where the Cape of Good Hope Old Lighthouse at Cape Town, South Africa decorated his stomach. Gus became a proficient tattooer himself during his world travels, practicing aboard ship and dockside between voyages. His first documented large-scale tattoos were completed in New Zealand in 1899.

In July 1901 Wagner sailed from Sydney, Australia to San Francisco aboard the Mariposa. He would not return to sea again. For a time he found work as a day laborer and fireman in California and Washington state, all the while continuing to tattoo. His home beckoned him, though, and he made his way back to Marietta, Ohio in May of 1902. Here, the limbs and body of family friend Ed Miller became the canvas for Gus's first stateside magnum opus—a glorious synthesis of Western, foreign and indigenous tattoo traditions. Gus continued Miller's extensive décor in various street shops throughout Ohio and in Chicago, likely in the curio hall of the Clark Street Dime Museum. An extraordinary set of cabinet cards document Miller's body suit, including some images with Gus's hand-painted embellishments (Lots 28 to 30).

Gus soon sought fresh outlets to express the riot of impressions that had captivated him on his world travels. He had experience exhibiting his tattooed body, a fine sense of spectacle, and an unquenchable urge to create; small wonder that he found fulfillment as an itinerant showman. Gus fashioned the costumes and props for, and starred in, a hair-raising cannibal act and various Native American skits, and built a traveling museum of curios he both collected and created. When trouping with traveling shows he tattooed from a tipi festooned with a banner proclaiming him a "Professional Globe Trotter, World Champion Hand Tattoo Artist, and Tattooed Man." During these early years, he established a seasonal pattern of work that brought him income year-round, tattooing from shops in the winter and traveling with shows in carnival season.

The origins of Gus's romance and marriage to the remarkable Maud Stevens are often misreported. The two had met by 1903 as fellow troupers playing the Midwest in small carnivals, including the Wonderland Shows. Gus was tattooing and wowing the sideshow crowds in fur, feathers and warpaint; Maud and her sister Dora performed as contortionists and sang and acted in sideshow skits. Gus and Maud hit it off, and the three began traveling together, managing and promoting their own acts as a company they dubbed "Wagner & Stevens Sisters." A photograph taken in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1903—one of the earliest images of Gus and Maud together—captures the intimacy and heady promise of their burgeoning relationship (Lot 24). While Maud continued to perform with Dora, Gus set about expanding her already considerable abilities, teaching her to tattoo and inscribing her slender form with a body suit of her own.

The following year, Gus, Maud and Dora moved to St. Louis to ply the immense crowds of the 1904 World's Fair with their diverse acts and needle skills.3 Maud was tattooing with Gus by then, and her body suit was nearing completion—her arms and back were done in St. Louis—readying her for work as a tattooed performer. The trio booked their shows at local venues, and Gus and Maud tattooed from a storefront shop on a busy St. Louis thoroughfare. Their takings must have been considerable. Gus claimed to have inked over 1900 people in St. Louis during the summer of 1904; while that number was probably inflated, business undoubtedly was brisk. Gus and Maud married at this time, a move perhaps indicative of just how flush they felt.

For the next two decades, Gus and Maud Wagner crisscrossed the country, trouping on the carnival circuit in summer and fall and tattooing in shops and performing in dime museums in the off season. Gus seems to have finished Maud's body suit during a stint in Los Angeles; they documented its completion in an extraordinary photograph taken at the Luz Studio there. Apparently recognizing the portrait as a marketing coup, Gus sent it to the Library of Congress for copyright. His instincts were correct: the photograph remains today among the Library of Congress's most shared images.

In 1910, the Wagners' daughter and only child Lotteva was born. Though her parents forbade Lotteva from acquiring tattoos, she, like all children of troupers, found her place among the carnivals' acts, working as a tattooer, circus rider, horse trainer, and sign restorer and painter.

Gus took his own traveling show to San Antonio, Texas in 1917. Driving a truck and tall wagon emblazoned with "Wagner's Traveling Museum" and "Tattooing as Done in the South Sea Islands," Gus set himself up on Houston Street near the Alamo. There he treated the fort's sightseers to a motley, fascinating collection of curiosities and relics, worlds away from the Texas Revolution—and to the rare spectacle of hand tattooing.

Gus's omnivorous curiosity made him a passionate collector of natural oddities, eerie relics, human skeletons and mummies, rocks, animals, and tribal artifacts; in the course of his career he amassed an eclectic, highly personal "cabinet of curiosities" intended to both educate and astonish. He used them in his shows, displayed them in his traveling "Curiosity Shop," and traded them with friends and fellow collectors. To enhance his collections he became a skilled taxidermist, hauling his greatest work—an enormous taxidermied manatee—around the country as a major attraction. When a genuine item could not be had (the US Treasury Dept. did not permit him to import a mongoose), or stagecraft required something nature could not produce, Gus made it himself. Among other such sideshow "gaffs," he fashioned homemade mermaids and a giant seahorse—items he exhibited as marvels from the South Sea Islands or the abyssal deeps. In pursuit of ever more fearsome effects for his acts, he created multiple new, elaborate costumes and props for what was now his "Cannibal Fire-Eating King" performance.

Throughout their career, the Wagners gathered friends with the same enthusiasm and dedication as they did curios. Their far-flung network of associates included tattoo artists, snake handlers, dealers and suppliers of arcane materials, show proprietors, animal breeders, and performers of every stripe. By the 1930s Gus had formed a special friendship with Raymond E. Blake, an unassuming newspaper advertising manager by day and, in his off hours, a character impersonator, collector of antiques and curiosities, and supplier of theatrical costumes and props. Blake also operated a curio shop and museum in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, and here Gus found a ready and appreciative market for his visionary art. He sold Blake dozens of items, including small curios to be sold as souvenirs, old props from his sideshow acts, and many original works of art. These later carvings and constructions seemed imbued with a deeper meaning for Gus; he most often gifted them to friends or added them to his personal collection, photographing them for his scrapbook in carefully-arranged displays. His creations were informed by the art of cultures he had met on his travels and elaborated by his imagination, and he used the materials he had at hand: wood, bone, teeth, hair and paint. Gus made many of these items during respites from work, when he and his family retreated to a farm in Kansas that had belonged to Maud's parents.

After Raymond Blake's death in 1986, Blake's widow befriended local artists Rhett and Kelly Johnson, who acquired the wonderfully strange, exuberantly imagined "carvings and curios" offered here (Lots 32 to 74). The Johnsons have been the stewards of these rare survivors of Gus's extensive output for over forty years. Many of them appear in Gus's photographs, a kind of anthropological record of his own deeply personal, visionary culture.

The Wagners and their daughter Lotteva continued on the circuit through the 1930s, performing and tattooing together. On breaks from the road they were often in colorful residence at their Flint Hills farm in Clements, Kansas, where their activities bemused and diverted the locals. Maud and Lotteva operated Wagner's Flint Hill Studio from the house, painting sideshow and carnival banners; Lotteva and her husband ran the business in later years. The family kept a menagerie of birds, lizards, snakes, toads, and turtles in one room of the house, their herpetological hobbies even extending to defanging copperheads and rattlesnakes to render them harmless. Maud was apparently quite fond of her Gila monster, though others, fearing that she would be bitten, were secretly relieved when it died.

Gus, ever the creative force, never lost his gusto for performing his acts, collecting relics and fabricating oddities. He remained a dashing figure with piercing eyes and a broad smile, sporting rakish Van Dyke whiskers. In a late portrait taken around 1939, Gus wears a leopard-skin vest under a broad-lapeled coat; on his lap, like strange, much-loved offspring, he holds two children's skeletons and a mummy.

The following year, in an improbable act of celestial theater even he might have appreciated, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning. He died of its complications months later. Maud Stevens Wagner survived Gus by several decades, dying in 1961.

Notes:

1. Wagner's life is documented in detail in his travel album, part of The Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin Collection at the South Street Seaport Museum, New York.

2. For more information on Wagner, see Alan Govenar, Gus Wagner: Globe Trotter and Hand Tattoo Artist (2023).