1896, James McNeill Whistler, The Manager's Window, Gaiety Theatre -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Whistler kept a firm grasp on the interlocking dynamics of performance, publicity, and prosperity. One of his earliest cropped, geometric streetscapes pictured the Gaiety Theatre. He revisited this motif in 1896, two years after theater manager George Edwardes premiered the comedy The Shop Girl, ushering in a form of musical entertainment suitable for respectable Victorian audiences. The heroine, Bessie Brent, is an underpaid store employee who believes her job will never reward her financially or romantically. Yet she eventually inherits one million dollars and finds true love, solidifying the "noble institution" of the retail warehouse, the precursor to the modern department store.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.
1896, James McNeill Whistler, The Manager's Window, Gaiety Theatre -- National Museum of Asian Art (Washington)
From the museum label: Whistler kept a firm grasp on the interlocking dynamics of performance, publicity, and prosperity. One of his earliest cropped, geometric streetscapes pictured the Gaiety Theatre. He revisited this motif in 1896, two years after theater manager George Edwardes premiered the comedy The Shop Girl, ushering in a form of musical entertainment suitable for respectable Victorian audiences. The heroine, Bessie Brent, is an underpaid store employee who believes her job will never reward her financially or romantically. Yet she eventually inherits one million dollars and finds true love, solidifying the "noble institution" of the retail warehouse, the precursor to the modern department store.
Link to other paintings from the exhibition Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change.
Link to other Whistler paintings.