Everett Shinn

Everett Shinn (1876-1953)

The son of a Woodstown, New Jersey, bank teller and his wife, Everett Shinn studied at the Spring Garden Institute and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. As a young man he was employed as a designer of lighting fixtures for Thackeray Gas Fixture Works and as an artist-reporter for the “Philadelphia Press”, where he met George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, and Robert Henri. In 1897 Shinn moved to New York, where he worked for the New York “World” and “Ainslee's Magazine” and developed a career as a brilliant pastellist, commercial illustrator, and recorder of the New York scene. Sent abroad by the dealer Boussod and Valadon 1900, he recorded scenes of London and Paris life that reveal a debt to the works of Edgar Degas. Shinn’s adoption of oil painting at this time marked his emergence as a fine artist.

Shinn is most often associated with The Eight, with whom he exhibited in 1908 at Macbeth Gallery. With this groundbreaking show, Shinn, John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Arthur B. Davies announced their break with the art establishment and emphatically proclaimed their preference for painting city life,its grittiness, ugliness, and social stratification, its streets, parks, tenements, theaters, and restaurants. Shinn, became known for his depictions of the theater and vaudeville. “London Hippodrome” (1902; Art Institute of Chicago) is perhaps the best known of his early entertainment scenes. At various times in his career he also wrote and staged his own vaudeville acts, designed sets and costumes for movies and the theater, and worked as a Hollywood art director, a muralist, and an interior decorator. As a commercial illustrator he contributed to over twenty-eight books and ninety magazine stories.

Shinn's early scenes of New York and the theater are generally regarded as his most brilliant works. Late in his career he returned to those subjects, but with less energy, verve, and success. In 1949 he was elected to the National Academy of Design, the institution against which he had so protested in the first decades of the century. In spite of a tremor and lung cancer, Shinn painted until his death at age seventy-seven.

French Vaudeville, 1937

Oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 1/8 in. (63.8 x 76.5 cm)

Signed and dated (lower left center): EVERETT SHINN--1937

Harriet Russell Stanley Memorial Fund (1946.22)

“French Vaudeville”, one of the countless theater subjects that dominated Shinn's production after 1900, is ostensibly a Paris scene executed in New York late in his career.(1) Essentially a reworking of a earlier pictures, such as “The Orchestra Pit”, “Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre” (c. 1906-07; private collection), “Footlight Flirtation” (1912; private collection), and “Dancer in White before the Footlights” (1910; Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio), it portrays a beautiful young chanteuse during a performance. The heads of several musicians and audience members can be seen at the bottom in semidarkness and partially obstruct our view of the stage, as if we were actually in attendance ourselves. The singer seductively lifts one side of her gown to reveal a long stockinged leg and directs her gaze toward the bass viol player, who gazes up with rapt attention. The curled head of his instrument echoes the curves of her body and fan, just as his plucking the strings of his instrument echoes her skirt lifting gesture.

Shinn’s subjects are similar to those of earlier French painters who depicted the theater and cafe entertainments.(2) Like a number of Shinn's depictions of the stage, “French Vaudeville” uses a variety of compositional devices derived from Degas's views of the Paris cabaret: the flattening of space, the jarring juxtaposition of the stage performers with members of the audience or orchestra, the use of the edge of a stage or balcony as a prominent design element, the jutting heads or instruments that break the plane of the stage, and the glaring footlights blurring the performers' costumes and illuminating faces. While Shinn’s views of the theater are not charged with the sexual tension, ambiguities of social class, and sense of modern spectacle that characterize many of the works of Degas and his French contemporaries, (3) he was a deft and popular chronicler of his time and its entertainments.

MAS

Bibliography:

Edith DeShazo, “Everett Shinn, 1876-1953: A Figure in His Time” (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1974); Linda Ferber, "Stagestruck: The Theater Subjects of Everett Shinn," in Doreen Bolger and Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., eds., “American Art around 1900: Lectures in Memory of Daniel Fraad” (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art 1990), pp. 51-67; Elizabeth Milroy, Painters of a New Century: “The Eight and American Art”, exhib. cat. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991); Barbara C. Rand, "The Art of Everett Shinn," Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1992; H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, “American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life”, 1885-1915, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994); Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: “The Ashcan Artists and Their New York”, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1995).

NOTES:

1. Shinn to Mrs. William H. Bentley, NBMAA, letter, September 7, 1950, NMBAA files.

2. Ferber, "Stagestruck," p. 61.

3. H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, “American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life”, 1885-1915, exhib. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), pp. 204-19.