I found the bronze-looking statue of the boy on a table near a wall among furniture and other items prior to a special sale at the auction house. It took a while to find him, but there he was, his back against a wall, a print image of him and two others in a frame propped up next to him.
The print was titled “Tickled to Death,” and it showed three little black boys with expressive faces from another era. The boy in the center had the biggest smile, and perhaps that was why he was chosen for immortality.
He appeared to be the oldest of the three, and was reproduced in a life-size painted terracotta stone statue that was nearly 4 feet tall.
Who were these boys, I wondered, and how did they end up in this print and sculpture. The small type on the print gave a little information, but not enough to identify them and the circumstances of this gathering. It noted that the print was copyrighted in 1892 by Geo. E. Matthews & Co., owner of the Illustrated Buffalo Express newspaper in New York.
I learned that the print and statue had different histories:
“Tickled to Death” print
The print was reproduced from a photo by Clarence B. Moore, a well-known and wealthy Philadelphia archaeologist who spent 30 years in the late 19th and early 20th centuries excavating burial grounds in such places as Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas.
Moore wrote several papers about his archaeological finds, illustrating them with his photographs and line drawings of artist Mary Louise Baker, for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
He was also an amateur but skilled photographer who won top prizes in joint photo exhibitions sponsored by photographic clubs in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities, and also in Toronto, where his photos were sought after.
“Tickled to Death” won a bronze medal in 1893 as one of four “Honor Pictures for 1892” from the Photographic Society of Philadelphia.
Also in 1892, the photo won first place and $25 in the first annual amateur competition sponsored by the Illustrated Buffalo Express. Two years later, the photo was apparently published in the newspaper, and the caption noted that it was the most popular ever produced by the publication.
Moore seemed to have photographed the boys while he was in Florida. With his steam-powered paddleboat the Gopher of Philadelphia, he traveled the rivers of the state for his archaeological digs. Photos of his expeditions showed African American men and boys among his workers.
The auction print showed the boys sitting on a box bearing the word “Plant,” which likely referred to a railroad system in the state owned by a man named Henry B. Plant, for which Plant City, FL, was named. The town is just east of Tampa.
In a paper Moore read at a meeting of the photographic society in 1894, he talked about the planning that goes into capturing the perfect photo. He illustrated his point with a story of one photo he took of several African American boys in Florida – seemingly not the ones in “Tickled to Death.” Over the past few years, he said, he had committed a lot of time to “photographic studies of colored subjects.”
“Last winter I happened to be lying at the wharf of a small Florida river town, and, after considerable debate, determined to try a picture of which I had been thinking for weeks, as there seemed to be considerable available material in the neighborhood. A part of a morning was devoted to persuading, with the aid of pecuniary inducements, various parents to allow five small colored children to pose in their everyday clothes. Colored people are sensitive as to their appearance, and still more so as to the appearance of their children and wish them to wear their most stylish garments when facing the camera.”
The parents finally relented, a spot of land was cleared for the background, a cart with wheels was made, and children who preferred play to posing were rounded up and bribed with “a stick of candy” to remain still.
Might this have been the same method that Moore employed with the boys in “Tickled to Death,” and they were among the “colored subjects” he had been photographing for years in the 1890s? Here are others of his works of African American and white subjects.
In 1899, “Tickled to Death” was used as the title of a composition of ragtime music written by Charles Hunter, its cover an illustration of the print of Moore’s photo. The song by the blind-from-birth composer was said to be very popular.
“Tickled to Death” statue
The statue was created by the firm of Frederich Goldscheider, who founded his Goldscheider Manufactory and Majolica Factory in 1885 in Vienna, Austria. The company was said to be quite influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with factories also in Paris; Leipzig, Germany, and Florence, Italy.
Photos of Goldscheider’s statues on the web showed that the company produced replicas of many types of people, from real to mythical. There are several representations of the boy in Moore’s painting, including this one of a boy fishing. During the 1880s, Goldscheider won medals at national and international exhibitions for his works.
In the 1890s, the firm began making pieces in a bronze color, and these became very popular in Paris, where he opened a branch of his company to manufacture these bronze imitations. Some of these were shown at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Most of the company’s works were either unglazed earthenware or painted to resemble bronze. Among its products were statues, tobacco jars and jardinieres, or large pottery planters. From 1922 to around 1935 during the Art Deco period, the company made lithe women figures.
The firm attracted artists from all over the world during its heyday, and its works were a sign of stature for those who could afford them. Goldscheider died in 1897, and the family continued running the company until it closed in 1953.
During World War II, some members of the Goldscheider family, who were Jewish, were sent to the concentration camps and did not survive. During a visit to the firm by the Nazis, the molds were hidden behind a furnace and remained there until a grandson recovered them about 30 years later.
As for the sculpture of the boy at auction, it sold for $1,700.
