Don Jose Manoel
(1836-1881)

The Brazilian wire walker, juggler and balancer Manoel Antonio Dutocq, known professionally as Don Jose Manoel, thrilled British audiences during the 1860s and 1870s. When he appeared in Liverpool in 1864 a local reviewer reported that he ‘preserves his equilibrium on a slack wire no thicker than a goose quill, in all imaginary positions, and under wonderful combinations of difficulties.' According to another report: ‘He balances a sword on the edge of a drinking glass, which rests upon a sort of pipe inserted in his mouth, and at the top of the sword a revolving bowl. After this he whirls a similar bowl upon a multi-coloured stick, which he cleverly balances, and while doing so goes through more feats of jugglery, amid which fireworks contained in the bowl ignite and envelop the performer in a shower of fire similar to a monster Catherine wheel’. When he appeared in Edinburgh in 1865, The Scotsman reported that: ‘Don Jose’s performance is at once novel and clever. A wire-rope, about half-an-inch in circumference, is suspended loosely from two poles, and this Don Jose walks without the aid of a balancing-pole. Standing upon one foot on the wire, he performs a large number of new juggling feats and concludes by balancing a pole on which a number of fireworks revolve, the fire falling in a shower around him. Don Jose was very enthusiastically received and afterwards twice called into the arena.’

In 1863 in London Don Jose Manoel married Annie Tennant, a woman from Cardiff. Their marriage produced four children. 

Don Jose died in London, aged 45, on 14 April 1881. At the time of the 1881 census, taken only 11 days before his death, he was a patient at the Chest Hospital on City Road. 

A pencilled inscription verso in a period hand identifies the sitter. His name also appears under ‘artistes dramatiques’ in Disdéri’s fifth catalogue, issued on 15 March 1861, which gives that added information that he performed at the ‘Cirque,’ presumably the Cirque Napoléon, now the Cirque d’Hiver.