One of the exasperating anomalies of history is that people can get lost in it. One minute they’re recognized; the next, no one remembers their name.
That seemed to be the case when my auction buddy Janet and I came across some postcards and bronze sculptures a year or two ago at auction. She collects African American postcards, so she was excited about a set of four showing two couples demonstrating the cakewalk. The postcards were even more amazing because the couples were not depicted as stereotypes at a time when most representations of black people were shown as such.
The bronzes by Austrian sculptor Carl Kauba showed a boy and girl dancing the cakewalk. Janet and I were convinced that the models were black children based on their facial features.
Neither the postcards nor the bronzes gave any hint of who these people were, and I was not able to identify them. A week ago, I got some help. A reader named Jim emailed me with history on both. Here’s what he said about the sculptures and the models, which he wrote about on his website:
‘The models for this pair of cold-painted bronzes were well known when the Paris cakewalk craze was in full bloom in 1903, and for several years afterward. Here is the first paragraph from their profile at the Oxford African American Studies Center:
Walker, Ruth “Rudy” and Frederick “Fredy” Walker (31 Aug. 1891–after 1928) and (9 Nov. 1893–May 1977), known as The Walkers, song and dance entertainers and actors, were both born in Chicago. It appears that at some time in 1902, the two juvenile dancers, brother and sister, traveled to Europe in the company of their mother, Ella Walker, herself an artist, born in Chicago (in 1860s), according to her own conflicting statements.
That they traveled with their own mother is mentioned in June 1903 and again in the winter 1903/1904 in Vienna, December 1906 in Stockholm, in November 1907 in Berlin, and again in February 1908 in Copenhagen. Billed as “Les Enfants Nègres,” their presentations of the cakewalk dance attracted a lot of attention at the Nouveau Cirque at Paris and paved the way for a long career in Europe. They became so popular that they inspired a composer, a sculptor, and a movie film director, as well as cartoonists.
Their portraits appear on many postcards; in fact, they might well be the most often photographed black entertainers of the period. The cards show them in various dance poses – sometimes together and sometimes solo. Mostly they wear tall, calf-length socks and white dance shoes. The boy wore a white dance costume or gymnast’s suit with a black sash, whereas the girl wore a short skirt.”
The bronzes were not cold-painted, as Jim corrected himself in a subsequent email. Here are some painted sculptures of the two dancers.
Rudy and Fredy certainly fit the images, down to their poses. So, I’m presuming they were Kauba’s models – whether in person or from a postcard. Kauba also made bronzes of the U.S. West, although there is some question about whether he ever came to the country.
Jim’s site and another I came across had postcards of the two children. The second site had a smorgasbord of cakewalk dancers and others who appeared in Paris dance halls from the 1800s to 1920s. Printed on Rudy and Fredy’s cards was the inscription “Danse au Nouveau Cirque, Les Enfantes Negres.”
The site set the publication year of their cards at 1905. Jim noted that the Oxford site had a date of 1903.
Here’s what he wrote about the postcards of the couples:
“That mailing card (the address side) features a doctored photo of Bert Williams from the set. Part of his leg is obscured by the dress of one of the women in the original photo from which this image is taken. His (too small) bowler hat is covered by the stamp. You’ve got a half a set of eight postcards created from photographs of Bert Williams, George Walker, Aida Overton (Walker), and Stella Wiley demonstrating the cakewalk. That’s the easy part. Dating the photos is more difficult. Several online booksellers date them c. 1896.”
Bert Williams, George Walker and Ada (or Aida) Overton Walker were the names most associated with the cakewalk. Williams (in blackface) and George Walker became a comedic team around 1896, and one site noted that the cakewalk was such a signature dance in their performances that many people thought they invented it (they didn’t). It seemed, though, that Overton Walker made it high-class, respectable and her trademark after joining the company.
The postcards seemed to have derived from ads made for the American Tobacco Co. , which asked the men to pose for its Cheroot cigars. The company wanted women to accompany them, so they enlisted Wiley who asked Ada Overton. She resisted, finally relenting after being overly wooed by Walker, who later became her husband, according to the 2008 biography “Introducing Bert Williams.” This anthology on tap dance has a graphic image of her and George doing the cakewalk in 1903.
The postcard series numbered 1-8, and bookstores online were selling sets by Franz Huld Publishers circa 1900. All eight of the colorized cards featured the two couples, with a child said to be in card No. 5.
The address side of the postcard at auction showed a congressional authorization date of 1898, and the other side listed Franz Huld as publisher. The postmark date on the postcard was 1904.
Knowing the history or provenance of the cakewalk items made them even more interesting. Maybe either Janet or I should’ve bidded on the bronzes.
