Gyer's Prismatic Fountains

For Wordless Wednesday, a little Victorian oddity to leave you (perhaps) speechless.

Professor and Madam Gyer offer, in 1884, an act which combines tableaux vivants - people frozen into dramatic poses, often in various stages of undress - with fountains upon which colored lights were shone. You can see the models standing under the fountains in this peculiar picture from an 1884 New York Clipper.

The tableau vivant - literally "living picture" - was a popular form of what we would call performance art now. Think of it as recreating two-dimensional pictures on stage - i.e., an artistic game of "Statues." By mid-century it had filtered down to the music halls an excuse for showing women in various stages of undress.

This is why, in this ad, the Gyers insist that their entertainment is both "chaste and elegant" - in other words, that the luckless models were wearing clothing, albeit wet and cold.

It was surprisingly difficult to track down the Gyers in public records. Perhaps it is not so surprising - itinerant theater people (who often did not use their real names) prove very hard to find on the US census, for example.

However, I did find a poster of Madam Gyer posing in 1900, as Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty: a chaste and elegant tableau vivant, sans prismatic fountain.