| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Emma de Burgh |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Industrial |
| Location | Chatham Square, the Bowery · New York City |
| Date | 1885 CE |
| Style / Technique | Victorian religious and patriotic full-body sideshow work, hand and early electric |
| Connected to | Samuel O'Reilly, Electric Machine Patented, Captain George Costentenus |
Archive Note
Emma de Burgh worked the late nineteenth century sideshow as one half of a married pair, the husband and wife tattooed act that the de Burghs helped define. She married Frank de Burgh in 1885 in Burlington, Iowa. By one account Frank was born James Burke, but that claim is single source and unverified, so it carries no weight here. What is firm is the marriage, the date, and the act that followed.
The couple came up at the moment the exhibition of tattooed bodies was shifting from a maritime novelty into an organized theatrical spectacle. They went to New York City and contracted with Samuel O'Reilly for extensive body suits. O'Reilly was then working out the electric tattooing machine he would patent in 1891, U.S. Patent No. 464,801, so a large share of the de Burghs' early work was applied by hand with traditional needles rather than by the powered machine he is remembered for. The work straddles the two methods at the exact hinge between them.
Emma's body carried the piece she became known for. Across her upper back she wore an elaborate reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Frank answered it with a large depiction of the Crucifixion across his own back. The pairing was deliberate. Against the Victorian stigma that still clung to marked skin, the de Burghs chose heavily religious and patriotic imagery, presenting the tattooed body as devotional rather than disreputable.
The marriage itself went onto the skin. Each of them had the other's name tattooed in place, dressed with hearts and decorative banners. For a touring couple selling respectability, the matched names were both a private vow and a public part of the act, a marital bond a paying audience could read off the body. That refined and respectable image set the de Burghs apart from the solitary tattooed performers working the same circuit.
They toured under circus management. Sells Brothers Circus route books place them on the road between 1890 and 1895, the organized end of the business that carried the act across the country. On an 1887 promotional tour in England they sharpened the pitch, claiming that some of their markings had been taken on to honor Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. The Jubilee tie was a marketing strategy rather than a fact of the work, and by the account it lifted their standing with British audiences considerably. A Paris promotional poster, Emma et Frank de Burgh, Alcazar d'Ete, survives from around the same year and shows how far the act traveled.
Emma de Burgh's place in the record sits at that early junction. She was a working woman who carried a full devotional suit through the circus years, tattooed in New York by the man about to mechanize the trade, and she helped make the married tattooed couple a fixture of the American and European sideshow. Albert Parry set the account down in his 1933 book Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States, the source most of what is known about her runs back to.