A Musical Farce Comedy: The Air Ship by J.M. Gaites – Antique Wall Art
(Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
This rare historic image captures A Musical Farce Comedy: The Air Ship by J.M. Gaites in remarkable detail. It is part of the Snapshots of the Past archive, gathered over 25 years of research.
The framed print arrives ready to hang; the unframed option suits custom framing. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Since 2001, Snapshots of the Past has shipped historic prints to tens of thousands of customers around the world.
A Musical Farce Comedy: The Air Ship by J.M. Gaites
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Few things in this gallery are as theatrical as this piece, which presents an airship not as a machine of science but as the premise of a musical farce. The work is credited to J.M. Gaites and frames aerial travel as comic spectacle, a sign of how thoroughly flight had entered popular entertainment. In the late 19th century, balloon ascensions drew crowds at fairs and exhibitions, and newspapers followed experiments with steerable airships closely. Stage pieces like this one turned that public excitement into songs, costumes, and slapstick, so the image is worth reading as both an advertisement and a record of how Americans imagined the sky.
| Original scan | 1,395 × 2,149 px · prints to 5 × 7 in at 300 dpi |
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| Reference | 0885u |
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Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation.
