Lot 245: Sandow's Developer.

Sandow's Developer.
L. LUCIEN FAURE (1892-?)
Imp. Charle Vernaeu, Paris
Cond A-/Unobtrusive folds.
Though today's viewer might believe that Faure's awed ninety-eight-pound weakling has wandered upon the miraculous sight of a classical statue come to muscle-rippling life grace of a piece of home gym equipment, they'd be wrong. For the naked hunk on display is none other than Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), a pioneering bodybuilder of the Victorian era often referred to as the "Father of Modern Bodybuilding." That he appears to be a sculpted slab of beefcake is no mistake: Sandow-a great admirer of Greek and Roman statues of gladiators and mythical heroes-actually measured the marble artworks in museums and helped to develop "The Grecian Ideal" as a formula for the perfect physique. None other than Florenz Ziegfeld saw the young strongman and hired him for his carnival show, where Sandow quickly became a sensation and Ziegfeld's first star. After performing all throughout Europe and the United States, he wrote five books on bodybuilding and nutrition that promoted a "healthy" lifestyle-which included "Sandow Cigars and Sandow's Health & Strength Cocoa"-as being as important as having a sound mind, published a magazine devoted to the physical culture, opened a string of immensely popular health clubs and organized the first ever bodybuilding contest in 1901 in London. And as if that wasn't enough, he owned a mail-order physical instruction and exercise equipment business and was the inventor of a unique spring-loaded dumbbell and a weighted rubber band resistance training system, which is none other than the device promoted here. When Sandow died in 1925, it was released that he had died prematurely at age fifty-eight of a stroke shortly after pushing his car out of the mud; however, it's far more likely that the actual cause of his death was complications from syphilis.
1899
39 1/2 x 54 1/2 in./100.2 x 318.3 cm