History didn’t know what to do with Fred G. Johnson. On the one hand, he was just another hard-working Chicago teen in the signage business, and far from a classically trained portrait artist. Yet, there weren’t many in the sign painting game making banners for “Bearded Brenda” or “Huey the Pretzel Man”; “Josephine the Electric Girl” or a herd of odd-legged animals. Of all the gigs a kid could fall into, this was the weirdest one, and it stuck: for the next 65 years, Johnson became the Picasso of circus banner painting by immortalising its stars for Barnum & Bailey, the Clyde Beatty Circus and more…
