Royal Living Marionette Theatre, Leicester Square. Will open Tuesday, September 20th, with J. R. Smith’s (artist of The Mississippi) Grand Tour of Europe, as exhibited last year on the Continent, with distinguished success!

This Interesting and Colossal Work of Art has been patronised by many Thousand Persons in Copenhagen, and the principal Towns in Europe, and was exhibited by command of His Majesty the King, and Court of Denmark; in Berlin, before 40,000 persons, His Majesty and the Royal Family of Pussia … Mr. Smith relies with confidence on the liberality of the London Public for a fair share of there support … The Tour will be Illustrated by an Instructive Lecture and appropriate Music. London : John K. Chapman & Company, 5, Shoe-lane, & Peterborough-court, Fleet-st., [1853]. Handbill, 190 x 125 mm, lithograph-printed recto only; early pencilled date of Sep. 1853 to bottom margin; a fine example.

‘The Grand Tour of Europe’ was designed by John Rowson Smith (1810-1864), an American scene-painter for several New York, St Louis, and New Orleans theatres, and a panorama artist and lecturer. Among his more celebrated panoramas were ‘Original Gigantic Moving Panorama of the Mississippi River’ (first exhibited in 1848 in Saragota Springs, N.Y., and then between 1849 and 1852 in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Brussels, Rouen, Antwerp, Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna, Lisbon, etc), and ‘Grand Moving Tour of Europe’ (first exhibited in Birmingham in 1851, then between 1852 and 1855 in Manchester, Leeds, Hull, Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Leipzig, Breslau, Frankfurt am Main, Brussels, Antwerp, London (September 1853-1854), and New York (1855). Smith’s Descriptive Book of the Tour of Europe was published in Frankfurt in 1853.

Altick, The Shows of London, p. 205, 479.