The Curious Case of the Blockhead Mummy
The successful exhibition in the early 1820’s of mummies such as Padihershef and Turner’s and Lee’s mummies, enticed others to import them and put them on the lecture and show circuit, or to display them in museums and other venues.
One such entrepreneur was George Barclay of New York, who obtained two mummies from Egypt through the agency of John W. Kearney, United States consul at Trieste. These arrived early in 1826, and were accompanied by the following letter as recorded in the Mercantile Advertiser of 15 February 1826.
"I have sent by the Hannibal, two genuine mummies on which you may depend, they were brought to Treaste [sic] by a very respectable man from Grand Cairo in Egypt, who saw them removed from the places of original deposit. I took every pains to ascertain his character and the result was a perfect conviction that these mummies are not only genuine, but of very great antiquity."
Barclay placed the mummies on exhibition at Peale’s Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, Broadway, across from the Park. According to the 14 February 1826 New York Evening Post the museum was open all day and brilliantly illuminated all evening.
Shortly after their arrival, Rubens Peale, proprietor of the Museum, bought the mummies himself, much to the dismay of his father, Charles Willson Peale, who worried that the revenue gained from their exhibition would be very slight and not worth the amount paid for the mummies.
Admission was the usual twenty-five cents, with children half-price. A yearly ticket to the Museum for a family was ten dollars, and for an individual, five dollars. A gentleman could obtain a ticket which allowed him to bring a lady the same oe, or a different one) for twn dollar. The yearly tickets were most likely tokens, as paper would easily disintegrate with use.
By April 1827 Peale had sold one of the mummies to a trio of gentlemen from upstate New York. Messers Frederick Boughton, Ira Curtis, and Ebenezer G. Holt exhibited the mummy, which was in a curious, distinctive, “blockheaded” coffin, at Ithaca, New York.
A.P. Searing & Co. of Ithaca printed up an eight-page brochure to accompany the exhibition. It was quite similar to the brochures which had accompanied earlier mummy exhibitions. The first page was a plate of the coffin, with “Will be exhibited at” printed lengthwise along the side, and a blank space left for the insertion of the exhibition venue.
A similar brochure, with less inside information, was also printed, this on by Mack and Andrus, also from Ithaca. The original image is again a woodblock which has been made into a stereotype plate. The artist is unknown