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]

Everett Shinn - The White Ballet [1904]

Everett Shinn - The White Ballet [1904], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Everett Shinn (Woodstown, New Jersey, 1876 - New York City, 1953) and many of his contemporaries spent their early years as newspaper illustrators, learning, as he said, to "observe...and get the job done." For The White Ballet, he used his reportorial eye and the compositional devices of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec to capture what he called "the uptown life." Cropped views of the orchestra pit and the stage collapse the distance between the spectators and the show, and dramatic lighting puts the viewer in the thick of the action. At the turn of the twentieth century, theatres of all kinds thrived in America's cities, providing public arenas where the rich and the wage-earners alike could see and be seen. Shinn embraced the spectacle of urban life, and once said that although he often looked to "night courts, dives, docks and dance halls" for his subjects, the lives of the well-to-do and the "sweep of furs and swish of wild boas" provided his most exciting themes.

[Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 93.3 cm]