Below are theater-related images from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them, a statuette of an actor from Attica, Greece 2,500 years old. Theater masks from first century Rome. A theater robe for an actor in 18th century China. A 19th century poster by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Edwin Booth in a cigarette ad! A series of abstract paintings in 2001 inspired by Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
The Met this week made all of the public-domain images of artwork in their possession — around 375,000 — free for anyone to use
Click on any image to see it enlarged and to read the extensive captions, provided by the museum.
Although Signora Gomez d’Arza did not belong to Thomas Eakins’s immediate circle, she inspired one of his most eloquent portraits. An actress of Italian ancestry, she was married to Enrico Gomez d’Arza, the impresario of a small theater that Thomas Eakins and his wife visited in the Italian quarter of Philadelphia. Susan Eakins recalled in 1927: “They were very poor, depending on their acting and Signora’s teaching young actors, for a living. They could not speak English. Mr. Eakins spoke Italian and learned from her that she had had tragic experiences in her early life. She was about thirty years old when the portrait was painted.
Painted in Chicago in 1909, this picture depicts the American actress Maude Adams in the role of Joan of Arc in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), in which she performed at Harvard University Stadium on June 22, 1909. The portrait was made specifically for the one-night gala performance and was displayed as a poster for the event. Mucha also designed the costumes and sets and supervised the direction. Afterwards, at the actress’s request, the painting served as the lobby poster for the Empire Theater in New York, where Adams regularly performed. Mucha designed the ornate, gilded frame.
Actor Edwin Booth in a cigarette ad. Trade cards from the “Actresses and Celebrities” series (N60), issued in 1887 to promote Little Beauties Cigarettes distributed by Allen & Ginter.
The Irish actress Elizabeth Farren made her London debut in 1777 as Kate Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. She was at the height of her career when this canvas was shown at the Royal Academy in 1790. Seven years later, she married the twelfth earl of Derby. This beautiful portrait helped to secure for Lawrence the role of successor to the elderly Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792).
Bertold Löffler (Austrian, Liberec (Bohemia) 1874–1960 Vienna) Three Masks, Fledermaus Theater and Cabaret, 1907 Austrian, Color Lithograph; Sheet: 5 1/2 × 3 9/16 in. (14 × 9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum Accession, transferred from the Library (WW.70) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/647640
Late fifth century BCE statuette of an actor. Fourteen of these figures are said to have been found together in a burial in Attica. They are among the earliest known statuettes of actors and are superbly executed and preserved. Originally they were brightly painted. They document the beginning of standardized characters and masks, indicating the popularity not of a specific figure but of types—the old man, the slave, the courtesan, etc.—that appeared repeatedly in different plays. By the mid-fourth century B.CE., Attic examples or local copies were known throughout the Greek world, from Southern Russia to Spain.
Madame Thadée Natanson (Misia Godebska, 1872–1950) at the Theater Lautrec made this study for the cover of the final issue of L’Estampe Originale (1893–95), a quarterly album of original prints by young French artists. Fittingly, it shows stagehands bringing down the curtain on a performance. In the middle, a plaster elephant stands guard atop a cartouche for the table of contents. Seated at left is Misia Natanson, the glamorous patroness of poets Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and of artists including Lautrec, Bonnard, and Vuillard. Now restored, this work was once sliced into two pieces and framed so as to reveal only Misia in her loge.
Marble disk with two theater masks in relief, 1st century Roman
Egyptian theater mask from second century. The mask is too small and brittle to have served as actual theater masks. It refers to the god Dionysus, patron of the theater and god of rebirth; in Egypt he was equated with Osiris. Terracotta theater masks are found in burials and sanctuaries in Greece, in sanctuaries and as garden decorations in Italy. In Egypt, they are known only from burials, as offerings to Osiris/Dionysus. Terracotta masks from Antinoopolis in Middle Egypt probably originate in tombs, and a terracotta theater mask was found in a Roman Period chapel over a burial at Hawara.
theater robe for an actor, 18th century China
Covent Garden Theater, 1792 by Thomas Rowlandson
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, Albi 1864–1901 Saint-André-du-Bois) The Coiffure: Playbill for the Théâtre Libre, 1893 French, Lithograph printed in color, on japan paper; 19-11/16 x 13 in. (50.0 x 32.99 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982 (1984.1203.140) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/334380
Kabuki actor, around 1708, attributed toTorii Kiyonobu. Kiyonobu, founder of the Torii line of artists, specialized in the painting of posters and signboards for the popular Kabuki theater. As required by the poster format, the bold, fluid lines, full, rounded forms, and flattened patterning were to be read at a distance. Kiyonobu’s early experimentation with hand coloring was undertaken to enliven the stark black and white designs and to further the print’s decorative appeal.
Georges Seurat (French, Paris 1859–1891 Paris) Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), 1887–88 Oil on canvas; 39 1/4 x 59 in. (99.7 x 149.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960 (61.101.17) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/437654
Walker designed this poster for Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman in White,” staged at the Olympic Theatre, London in 1871-2. Collins adapted the script from his enormously successful mystery novel published in 1859, and Walker was a friend. Considered the first theatrical poster by a well-known artist, the image represents the actress Anne Catherick swathed in a white cloak, flinging open a church door to step out into a graveyard at night.
Howard Hodgkin’s Into the Woods suite, which invokes the four seasons, began with Into the Woods, Winter. They are named after the eponymous Stephen Sondheim musical, which premiered in New York in 1987. On the stage, Sondheim and his librettist James Lapine spin together characters from numerous fairy tales into a single coming of age story, with the woods serving as a symbol of life and the passage of time
1954 dressing gown from Brooks Costume Company
A successful theatrical photographer in London, August McBean crafted masterful portraits of actors in their signature roles as well as more fanciful fabrications, including the Christmas cards he sent to close friends. Nearly every card features the bearded, twinkly-eyed McBean as the star of a different whimsical scenario. Here, he and his partner, David Ball, encounter a colossal nude in a barren lunar landscape that owes much to the Surrealist geographies of Salvador Dalí and Giorgio di Chirico.
Florine Stettheimer’s The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929 The Cathedrals of Broadway captures the magical atmosphere of neon-lit theaters, which offered films as well as live performances. As the United States entered the Great Depression, many Americans turned to the world of entertainment to escape reality. Here, New York’s mayor Jimmy Walker throws out the first pitch of the baseball season in a cinema newsreel. An elaborate stage show takes place below the screen, while the names of famous theaters glow around the central proscenium arch. Stettheimer gives little hint of the harsh conditions that confronted many New Yorkers in the 1930s.
Napoleon Sarony, an acknowledged master of celebrity photographs, succeeded Mathew Brady as the best-known portrait photographer in New York. Opening his first studio on Broadway in 1866 and moving to more elaborate premises on Union Square in 1871, Sarony took full advantage of the growing fascination with the theater that swept America in the aftermath of the Civil War. His inexpensive cartes de visite and more upscale cabinet cards, produced in the thousands, satisfied both the need of actors for publicity and the public’s mania for collecting their images. When this photograph was taken in January 1882, Oscar Wilde had not yet written “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891) and the plays that would make him famous in the next decade. Twenty-seven years old, he had to his credit only an unproduced melodrama, “Vera,” and a controversial book of verse.
