The Orchestra Pit, Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre, 1906
Oil on canvas, 17 7/16 x 19 1/2 in. (44.291 x 49.53 cm)
Bequest of Arthur G. Altschul, B.A. 1943
2002.132.1
Among the first American artists to embrace the theater as a signature theme, Shinn had a lifelong involvement with popular entertainment, working as playwright, producer, actor, and later as a movie set designer and art director. Around the time he painted The Orchestra Pit, Shinn was commissioned by impresario David Belasco to create murals for his Broadway theater. Belasco’s experiments with electric lighting are reflected in Shinn’s painting of musicians silhouetted against a stage bathed in an aquamarine glow. A female performer bends down to provocatively engage the foreground musician, or the artist himself, apparently seated in the first row. The setting for The Orchestra Pit is the incongruously named Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, located at Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street. By 1906 the Fifth Avenue Theatre, once a vaudeville palace specializing in continuous variety acts, instead devoted itself to dramatic productions. The Orchestra Pit may depict "the Extraordinary All-Star Jubilee Concert" in April 1906 that celebrated acrobat-turned-entrepreneur Frederick F. Proctor's twenty-fifth year in theatrical management.
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