City as Spectacle: William Birch's Views and the Chestnut Street Theatre

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Notes

1. ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser (27 March 1805). Throughout this essay, I refer interchangeably to the Chestnut Street Theatre as both the ‘New Theatre’, a name by which it was known during the early-nineteenth century, and by the abbreviation ‘CST’.

2. An exception is M. C. Milbourne, who worked as both the lead scene painter for the CST during the 1790s and as an actor. In June 1796, for example, the CST held a benefit for Milbourne during which, interestingly, the first American-authored post-revolutionary play was performed, Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787). See ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Milbourne, Scene-Painter’, Aurora General Advertiser (25 June 1796). On Milbourne's benefit nights, see John R. Wolcott, ‘Scene Painters and Their Work in America before 1800’, Theatre Survey, 18/1, 1977, pp. 69–70.

3. ‘New Theatre’, op. cit. 1. Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are was authored by the British actress and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald; it was a hit at Covent Garden when first performed in 1797. Daniel O'Quinn, ‘Scissors and Needles: Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are and the Governance of Sexual Exchange’, Theatre Journal, 51, 1999, p. 105.

4. On Loutherbourg's ‘Eidophusikon, or Representation of Nature’, and Loutherbourg's many imitators, see Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 121–127.

5. ‘New Theatre’, op. cit. 1. For a brief overview of this production, see Reese Davis James, Cradle of Culture, 1800–1810: The Philadelphia Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), pp. 68–69.

6. The Aurora’s description touted the accuracy of the Tripoli scenes: ‘Mr. Holland’, it noted, ‘feels himself greatly indebted to the officers and gentlemen of this city who were kind enough to lend him their aid in procuring the exact situation of the Gun Boats and plans of the Fortifications’. ‘New Theatre’, ibid.

7. In addition to the 27th March playbill (op. cit. 1), see ‘New-Theatre’, Poulson's American Daily Advertiser, 28 March 1805; ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 29 March 1805; ‘New-Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 1 April 1805; ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 2 April 1805; ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 3 April 1805. No playbills for the CST appeared in Philadelphia papers on 30 and 31 March, suggesting that the CST was closed on those days.

8. On panorama paintings in the early USA, see Stephan Oettermann, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

9. Emily T. Cooperman, ‘Success in the New World: American Career and Patronage’, in Cooperman and Lea Carson Sherk, William Birch: Painting the American Scene (Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), esp. pp. 66–75. For Birch's participation in the Columbianum exhibition, see ‘The Exhibition of the Columbianum, or American Academy of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, &c. Established at Philadelphia, 1795’ (Philadelphia, 1795).

10. On the arrival of British scene painters and the acquisition of sets, scene designs, toy theater sheets, and costumes from London theaters, see Ruth Harsha McKenzie, ‘Organization, Production, and Management at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, from 1791 to 1820’ (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1952), pp. 40–42; John R. Wolcott, ‘Apprentices in the Scene Room: Toward an American Tradition in Scenic Painting’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 4/1, 1976, p. 33; idem, ‘Scene Painters’, pp. 57–83; Judithe Douglas Speidel, ‘The Theatre and Early Romanticism in America’ (PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1983), pp. 90–91.

11. Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 86–87; James, Cradle of Culture, p. 59.

12. ‘Cinderella’, The Theatrical Censor (2 January 1806), p. 65. For examples of criticism in other publications, see ‘The Drama’, The Port-Folio (13 February 1802), p. 42; ‘New Theatre’, United States Gazette (Philadelphia), 4 December 1806.

13. Harold Kirker, ‘The New Theater, Philadelphia, 1791–1792’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 22/1 (March 1963), p. 37; John R. Wolcott, ‘Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre: A Plan and Elevation’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 30/3, October 1971, pp. 209–210.

14. Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, pp. 210–213.

15. Moreau de Saint-Méry quoted in Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, p. 212, and Richard Dengler Stine, ‘The Philadelphia Theater 1682–1829: Its Growth as a Cultural Institution’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1951), p. 113. Wolcott's and Stine's translations of Saint-Méry differ; I have reproduced the translation as it appears in Wolcott. See also Kirker, ‘New Theatre’, which reproduces a description of the interior that appeared in the newspapers Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Magazine.

16. ‘Description of the New Theatre, Philadelphia’, The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository, 5/4, April 1794, pp. 3–4. See also Nathans, Early American Theatre, pp. 72–73.

17. James Mease, Picture of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1811), pp. 330–331, reproduced in Darcy Sabin Carey, ‘A Conjectural Reconstruction of the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, 1794–1820’ (Master's thesis, University of Washington, 1974), p. 123.

18. See the three-dimensional, architectural reconstructions of the CST online at ‘The Chestnut Street Theatre Project’ (http://www.videooccasions-nw.com/history/cst/cstnuopn.htm).

19. Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, p. 209.

20. This data was obtained by comparing an annotated record of Birch's subscribers to a table of the CST's founders. See Cooperman and Sherk, ‘Appendix D: Subscribers to Birch's Views of Philadelphia’, in William Birch, pp. 263–277; Nathans, ‘Table 3 Philadelphia — Chestnut Street Theatre Founders’, Early American Theatre, pp. 176–178. Cooperman and Sherk report that Wignell subscribed to Birch's Views in 1803; Wignell also figures among the names featured in Birch's printed subscription list of 1800, indicating that Wignell subscribed to both the first (1800) and second (1804) editions. See Cooperman and Sherk, ‘Appendix D’, p. 276; W[illiam] Birch and [Thomas Birch], The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania, North America; as It Appeared in the Year 1800 … ([Philadelphia], 1800).

21. On Merry's marriage to Wignell, see Cooperman and Sherk, William Birch, p. 271.

22. On this point see Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Production in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early National Culture, 2011), pp. 113–169, esp. pp. 116–119.

23. For a summary of literature on this issue, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, pp. 119–120, n. 3.

24. On the significance of the theater's location in Philadelphia, see Nathans, Early American Theatre, pp. 64–65.

25. Ibid., pp. 88–89, 102–105, 151–154.

26. ‘A Drawing School, Opened by William Birch’, Aurora General Advertiser, 26 October, 1804.

27. Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, pp. 212–213.

28. ‘New Theatre’, Philadelphia Gazette, 15 October 1801.

29. Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, pp. 212–213, 217–218.

30. Martin P. Snyder, ‘William Birch: His Philadelphia Views’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 73, 1949, pp. 281–284, 305–308.

31. On views of the original CST building based on Birch's second edition view, see Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, p. 213. For Krimmel, see Anneliese Harding, John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, Library and Garden, 1994).

32. Wolcott, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, pp. 212–213; Snyder, ‘William Birch’, p. 282.

33. On Fox's performance, see Nathans, Early American Theatre, pp. 151–152; Bellion, Citizen Spectator, pp. 110–111.

34. For a reproduction of Holland's painting, see Wolcott, ‘Scene Painters’, p. 78.

35. Ibid., pp. 69–72, 76–78; William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, quoted in ibid., p. 76. On Milbourne and Holland, see also McKenzie, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, pp. 40, 151–153; Speidel, ‘The Theatre and Early Romanticism in America’, pp. 33–34, 90–92.

36. For an early example, see ‘New Theatre’, General Advertiser (Philadelphia), 10 March 1794.

37. Speidel, ‘The Theatre and Early Romanticism in America’, p. 92.

38. Wolcott, ‘Apprentices in the Scene Room’, p. 24. On the uses of stock scenery in British theaters, which set the precedent for early American playhouses, see Sybil Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 23–29.

39. ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 26 April 1799.

40. ‘New-Theatre’, Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), 4 April 1800. On the popularity of the Castle Spectre in London, see Michael Wilson, ‘Hazlitt and the Rivalry of the Sister Arts in British Theatre, 1750-1820' (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 1982), pp. 194–195.

41. McKenzie, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, p. 243.

42. ‘New Theatre’, The Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 22 February 1802. In 1806, a playbill for the pantomime, Brazen Mask; or Alberto and Rosabella, expanded the description of scenic effects to noteworthy lengths: see ‘New Theatre’, Aurora General Advertiser, 28 February 1806.

43. Michael Wilson notes that one of Loutherbourg's great accomplishments in the London theater, the pantomime The Wonders of Derbyshire, successfully mixed the conventions of the picturesque and the sublime. Given Loutherbourg's influence on the transatlantic development of theatrical spectacle, it seems likely that in evoking several genres of British landscape representation, the CST designers were following Loutherbourg's lead. See Wilson, ‘Hazlitt and the Rivalry of the Sister Arts’, pp. 116–117.

44. ‘New Theatre’, Philadelphia Gazette, 23 April 1800; Nathans, Early American Theatre, p. 163.

45. On transparencies and phantasmagorias representing the apotheosis of Washington, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, pp. 303–308.

46. ‘On the whole the performance [of Lovers’ Vows] may be said to have been heavy and dull. It was, however, as good as we have a right to expect for some time to come; as we understand that the manager is confident of being able, with the attraction of new dresses, new scenery, etc. to fill his house for at least a month or two. After that, if people should get tired of looking at pretty petticoats and jackets, we are told that he intends to engage a performer or two who shall be able to play the parts assigned to them’. See ‘New-Theatre’, The USA Gazette (Philadelphia), 12 December 1806.

47. Grim, ‘Mr. Censor’, The Theatrical Censor (2 January 1806), pp. 67–68. On other occasions, in particular the production of Cinderella in 1806, critics complained about the inept staging of certain illusionistic transformations. ‘We hope that … the pumpkin will undergo its metamorphosis with less difficulty, and Cinderella part with her garments more expeditiously’, suggested a reviewer in the same issue of The Theatrical Censor (p. 65). But staging gaffes continued to plague the production. ‘We were astonished to observe more blunders in the scenery, &c. than even on the first evening’, the critics reported following the fifth performance of the pantomime. A correspondent calling himself ‘Nicholas Bottom’ added, ‘I might say that the mice, pumpkin and horses, are very badly contrived; but I know the difficulty of getting these things done well; having myself been manager of a country company upwards of a year, and was frequently obliged to introduce a pig for an elephant. I would, however, through the medium of your paper, give the boys who play the horses, a hint not to peep at the audience under the trappings, which should conceal them. Tom Urchin was recognized by one of his playfellows in the gallery’. The Theatrical Censor (3 January 1806), pp. 71, 76. For a graver critique of stage production concerning machinery that produced a destructive fire at Rickett's Circus, across the street from the Chestnut Street Theatre, see ‘Philadelphia, Dec. 18’, Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), 18 December 1799.

48. Grim, ‘Mr. Censor’, op. cit., p. 47.

49. See Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 70.

50. Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 19.

51. The lack of public art exhibitions between 1795 and 1811 was offset by a few notable exceptions: a scandalous display of Adolph-Ulrich Wertmüller's painting Danaë and the Shower of Gold in 1806 and an installation of works by Benjamin West at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1807. A plaster cast collection of classical sculptures was housed at the latter institution, but it was not generally accessible to the public. See Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 85, pps. 85, 322.

52. Taking a long view of the nineteenth century, and describing a production mounted by Holland in 1807, McKenzie observed that ‘in the absence of moving pictures, art galleries, illustrated magazines, and photographs in newspapers, Philadelphians apparently came to the theatre frankly to enjoy what they could see, even it if meant merely looking at large pictures’. McKenzie, ‘Chestnut Street Theatre’, p. 243.

53. Spiedel makes a similar point in ‘Theatre and Early Romanticism’, p. 3, and in ‘Scene Painters’ (p. 71), Wolcott comments, ‘That the theatre should contribute to, rather than take from, the gallery and bookstall is logical when theatrical art fills a void not filled by artists outside the theatre … Consequently the theatre, whose plays often demanded or provided opportunity for exterior scenes, served as a rich source from which to satisfy the taste for topographical and landscape views’. For important exceptions to the historiographical disregard of early American theaters in art-historical scholarship, see Christine Jones Huber, ‘Playing Shakespeare in the Colonies: Charles Willson Peale, Miss Hallam, and the Paradox of the Actress’ (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2002); David Steinberg, ‘A Quiet Years’ Clash over Art, Painters, and Publics’, in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America, Maurie D. McInnis and Louis P. Nelson, eds (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 48–88.

54. Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters; Altick, The Shows of London, p. 120; Ralph G. Allen, ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire: A Spectacular Eighteenth-Century Travelogue’, Theatre Survey, 1961, p. 65.

55. On Loutherbourg's work repertory, see Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 120–127.

56. Allen, ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire’, pp. 54–66; see also Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters, pp. 33–34. Rosenfeld suggests that a taste for local scenery developed as early as the 1730s and thrived in regional theaters (pp. 32, 35–36).

57. Altick, The Shows of London, p. 120.

58. On Peale, see Speidel, ‘Early Romanticism’, p. 92; Lillian B. Miller et al., eds, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983–2000), Vol. I, pp. 429–432. Local scenery featured at early American theaters included views of Philadelphia's Arch Street wharf and Third and Market Streets, created by Milbourne for a Chestnut Street Theatre pantomime in 1795 (Wolcott, ‘Scene Painters’, p. 70); a mechanical production at the CST in 1802 reproducing Philadelphia's ‘Grand Federal Procession’ of 1788, a huge parade that celebrated the ratification of the federal Constitution (Charles Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage Between the Years 1749 and 1855, 2 vols., 1868, I); and views of the Hudson River and Yorktown in William Dunlap's The Glory of Columbia, mounted in 1803 at New York's Park Theatre (Speidel, ‘Early Romanticism’, p. 105).

59. On Milbourne's training under Loutherbourg, and Loutherbourg's influence on Chestnut Street Theatre scene painters, see Wolcott, ‘Scene Painters’, pp. 58–59, 69; Speidel, ‘Early Romanticism’, pp. 90–92.

60. See the playbills for the ‘New Theatre’, 2 and 3 April 1805, op. cit. 7.

61. At least two other artists had previously represented this historic site. Benjamin West painted Penn's Treaty with the Indians in 1772; the painting became widely known following John Hall's engraving of 1775, which in turn spurred reproductions by textile makers and folk artists. Unlike Birch's view, however, West's depiction highlighted Penn's treaty negotiations within an imagined colonial landscape. Closer to the time of Holland's ‘display of scenery’, in 1796, John James Barralet engraved a View of Philadelphia from the Great Elm Tree in Kensington. Barralet's composition represents a similar vantage to Birch's view, looking south from Kensington, although its foreground is crowded with shipbuilders and passengers boarding a ferry. For reproductions of West's painting and Barralet's engraving, see, respectively, Frances Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2008), p. 77; Edward Nygren with Bruce Robertson and Amy R.W. Meyers, Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986), p. 113.

62. Thomas Birch's painting is owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For Beck, see Nygren et al., Views and Visions, p. 236; Cooperman and Sherk, William Birch, p. 137.

63. On the ‘large plate’, see Snyder, ‘William Birch’, pp. 279–280; Nygren et al., Views and Visions, pp. 113–114, 238–239; Cooperman, ‘Success in the New World’, in Cooperman and Sherk, William Birch, pp. 77–79.

64. Here again the example of Loutherbourg is instructive: he achieved his memorable effects in The Wonders of Derbyshire by using painted drops. Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters, p. 50.

65. Wilson, ‘Hazlitt’, p. 127.

66. On the history and uses of drops in the English theater, see Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters, esp. pp. 47–51.

67. Cooperman, ‘Full Effect of Intention: The City of Philadelphia in 1800’, in Cooperman and Sherk, William Birch, pp. 125–126; S. Robert Teitelman, Birch's Views of Philadelphia: A Reduced Facsimile of the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: The Free Library of Philadelphia, 2000), n.p. [plate 28].

68. On perspective views that could be rendered as transparencies, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, pp. 49–50. Holes were cut into the windows of buildings and backed with colored paper; when backlit, a view could simulate night-time illuminations.

69. In the Views, the ‘Water Works is the end of the viewer's journey through the city of Philadelphia’. Cooperman, ‘Full Effect of Intention’, in Cooperman and Sherk, William Birch, p. 126.

70. ‘It was here’, noted the author, about the Treaty Elm, ‘that the Father of his country made a treaty with the harmless Natives, which was to last, in the figurative style of those nervous Aborigines, who have since been so grossly misrepresented by European Theorists, as long as the trees should grow, or the waters run’. The description of the pump house eschewed such flowery prose to emphasize technological marvel: ‘The intersection of the two principal streets is now occupied by a round Tower, for the reception and distribution of the Schuylkill water, raised by machinery to a level of thirty or forty feet above the highest ground in the City’. ‘A Brief Sketch of the Origin and Present State of the City of Philadelphia’, The Port Folio (6 April 1805), pp. 97–98.

71. J. Hall Pleasants, Four Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Landscape Painters (1942), reprint (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 15.

72. Nygren et al., Views and Visions, pp. 235–236.

73. Notably, Loutherbourg's first staging of the Eidophusikon had included a view of the port of Tangiers, perhaps suggesting the subject of Baltimore's harbor to Milbourne and Holland. See Altick, Shows of London, p. 121.

74. Altick, Shows of London, p. 124.

75. Nygren et al., Views and Vision, pp. 28, 236.

76. John Crowley, ‘The American Republic Joins the British Global Landscape’, in Shaping the Early Republic, pp. 103–105. In The Shows of London (p. 121), Altick notes that the second iteration of Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon included a scene of Niagara Falls.

77. Cooperman, William Birch, p. 137; Nygren et al., Views and Visions, p. 277.

78. Little appears to be known about Reinagle's ‘National Overture’, perhaps because fires at the Chestnut Street Theatre destroyed some of his scores. See Anne McClenny Krauss, ‘Alexander Reinagle, His Family Background and Early Professional Career’, American Music, 4/4, Winter 1986, pp. 425–456.

79. Theoretically, Holland could have included a scene of Washington, D.C., had he wanted to do so, for a pictorial model was available in the form of yet another landscape engraved by Beck and Cartwright: Georgetown and Federal City, or City of Washington, an aquatint published in 1801. See Nygren et al., Views and Visions, p. 23.

80. Crowley, ‘British Global Landscape’, pp. 89–91. Note that Crowley interprets Jefferson's description of the Natural Bridge in terms of an American nationalism grounded in a rhetorical and ideological convention of the ‘global British landscape’. For Crowley, William Birch's work also falls into this category (see pp. 110–113).

81. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), pp. 35–36.

82. Nineteenth-century artists including Frederick Edwin Church, Edward Hicks, and David Johnson portrayed the Natural Bridge in various media, and writers including Herman Melville and William Cullen Bryant waxed poetic about it. In 1830, many years after he worked for the Chestnut Street Theatre, scene painter Hugh Reinagle executed a depiction of the Natural Bridge; see Wolcott, ‘Apprentices in the Scene Room’, p. 35.

83. Jefferson quoted in Crowley, ‘British Global Landscape’, p. 91.

84. On Turpin and his view, see ibid., p. 91; for Weld, see Nygren et al., Views and Visions, pp. 199–200, 302.

85. For the full poem, see ‘Benefits’, The Theatrical Censor (10 January 1806), p. 134.