Everett Shinn - The Orchestra Pit, Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre [1906-07]

Everett Shinn - The Orchestra Pit, Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre [1906-07], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Popular commercial performance venues abounded in New York about 1900 and attracted the Ashcan artists' patronage and professional interest. Here, Shinn, who specialised in theatre images, portrays the popular vaudeville house that the impresario F. F. Proctor opened near Madison Square in 1900 and reopened after a major interior renovation in 1906. Shinn immerses the viewer in the scene, placing him in the front row, staring at the crimson velvet curtain that demarcates the pit and at the back of an anonymous musician. Having completed the seventh act in the bill, as the placard to the left of the stage announces, a dancer takes her bow. The image is a world apart, geographically, temperamentally, and stylistically, from mid-century painted stories of rural musical performances.

[Oil on canvas, 44.3 x 49.5 cm]