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  • 21 Aug, 2019

  • By, Wikipedia

Clowns Gallery-Museum

The Clowns Gallery-Museum is a museum of clowning. Established in 1959, the collection contains costumes and props from famous clowns, as well as a reference library, and is home to the Clown Egg Register.

History

The collection is split between the museum's two sites, the Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, and Wookey Hole, Somerset, England. The museum was established in 1959 in Dalston and the collection was split into a venue in Wookey Hole in 2007. The Dalston museum is situated in what was the vestry of the Holy Trinity Church. It was threatened with closure in 2014 but remained in place. The Wookey Hole museum is run by Gerry Cottle, vice president of Clowns International.

Clown Egg Register

The Clown Egg Register is an archive of painted ceramic and hen's eggs that serve as a record of individual clowns' personal make-up designs. The clown egg tradition began in 1946, when Stan Bult, a chemist, and founder of Clowns International, took to drawing the faces of club members and famous clowns onto chicken eggs. The egg gallery was created to forestall the possibility of accidental or intentional plagiarism: an unofficial rule prohibits any two clowns from sharing a single face paint design, with eggs providing a suitably head-shaped mannequin. Real eggs were originally used but were later replaced with ceramic eggs. The gallery is open on the first Friday of each month.

References

  1. ^ "The Clowns Gallery-Museum's History". Clowns International. Archived from the original on 4 October 2015. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  2. ^ Taylor, Jeremy (12 July 2013). "First Person: Matthew Faint – 'I run the clown egg register'". Financial Times. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  3. ^ Adams, Tim (7 June 2015). "Send out the clowns: why are they losing popularity?". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  4. ^ Polyviou, Natasha (30 January 2015). "A matter of laugh and death: what to expect at the Joseph Grimaldi service". Time Out. Retrieved 3 October 2015.
  5. ^ "Clowns Gallery-Museum London". Time Out London. Retrieved 19 April 2018.
  6. ^ Fagundes, David; Perzanowski, Aaron (2019). "Clown Eggs". Notre Dame Law Review. 94 (3): 1313–1380.