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Original chromolithographic poster for the touring variety troupe The American Brigadiers, entitled A Morning in Westamerica. Song, Dance and Transformation Act, printed by the Adolph Friedländer lithographic establishment, Hamburg, 1907 (lith. no. 4005), promoting an American-themed revue that blended frontier spectacle with minstrel and quick-change routines. 

Issued at the zenith of Europe’s fascination with Wild-West entertainment, the poster exemplifies Friedländer’s technically sophisticated color-stone printing. Founded in 1872, the Hamburg press produced more than 9,000 images for circuses and music-halls before its forced closure in 1935; its vivid chromolithographs, printed in runs of up to three thousand, set the continental standard for popular advertising art. 

The composition is arranged in three sections. A scarlet cartouche carries the troupe’s name, followed by a bold yellow banner naming the featured sketch. Beneath three billowing Stars-and-Stripes, uniformed female performers in frontier skirts flank a white cowboy and a seated Black banjo-player; two women recline avant-scène, evoking a camp-fire idyll. The lower frieze contains two vignettes: at left, a line of chorus girls arm-in-arm with a tambourine-wielding Black companion; at right, a cluster of performers with boot-lace neckerchiefs, their faces darkened for a blackface “transformation” turn, and an inset portrait-medallion of the troupe’s impresario. The high chroma palette—Prussian blues, cadmium reds, verdant greens—underscores the show’s promise of exuberant spectacle.

Beyond its pictorial appeal, the sheet documents several intersecting strains of early-twentieth-century popular culture: European enthusiasm for mythic American frontiers (kindled by Buffalo Bill’s tours and the novels of Karl May), the commercial vogue for female “brigade” drilling troupes, and the persistence of minstrelsy on the international variety circuit. While the poster foregrounds novelty and patriotism, the racialized caricatures—blackface ensembles juxtaposed with an ostensibly authentic Black musician—attest to contemporaneous stage practices that commodified both African-American and Indigenous identities for white audiences. 

Friedländer posters are celebrated for their dense, tableau-like scenes and for the seamless registration of up to ten lithographic stones. Here, the printer exploits diagonal flagpoles and receding tree lines to create a shallow proscenium space that echoes a theatre backdrop, simultaneously framing foreground figures and guiding the eye downward to the subsidiary panels. The cameo portrait, printed in a separate tint block, personalizes the advertisement, a Friedländer hallmark that helped patrons identify troupe leaders across changing bills.

“A Morning in Westamerica” typifies early-1900s European variety bills that packaged a kaleidoscope of acts—musical skits, precision dancing, trick-costume “transformation” numbers—within a loosely Western narrative. The term “transformation act” signaled quick-change illusions popular in vaudeville, wherein performers altered dress, skin tone, or gender presentation in rapid succession to awe audiences accustomed to novelty. 

Such revues intersected with Black vaudeville and minstrelsy. Although German impresarios sometimes booked African-American artists, the majority of “colored” appearances depended on white performers in burnt-cork makeup, perpetuating stereotypes while claiming exotic authenticity. The poster reflects this duality: a lone Black banjoist—perhaps an imported US artist—lends cachet, whereas the chorus tableaux rely on caricatured blackface. Their American flags and martial garb further fold racial spectacle into a comforting tableau of U.S. patriotism, appealing to continental audiences eager for an idealized, conquerable frontier.

Within Friedländer’s oeuvre, catalogue number 4005 belongs to a run of Wild-West, sharpshooting, and “Indian” subjects produced between 1904 and 1913, revealing both market demand and the printer’s agility in re-using stock motifs (flags, bandoliers, fringed skirts) to advertise successive troupes. The company’s archival numbering also aids dating: numbers in the 3900–4200 range cluster around 1907–08n. 

Today the sheet invites multiple readings: as commercial art of high technical accomplishment; as evidence of cross-Atlantic cultural exchange; and as a visual record of racialized entertainment practices that shaped, and were shaped by, imperial imaginaries on both sides of the ocean. 

Rarity

Surviving examples of Friedländer Wild-West posters are very rare, many having been pasted outdoors and discarded.

This is the only example we could locate (see provenance below).