Thomas G. Moses partnered with a variety of scenic artists throughout the duration of his career from 1873 to 1934, including Ernest Albert. As with Walter Burridge, both artists first worked for Harley Merry at the Park and Union Square Theatres in New York. Much of what is known of Albert comes from an article in the New York Dramatic Mirror, Vol. LXX (Nov. 19, 1913). He explained in 1913 that he had avoided many interviews due to “frequent misquoting and misrepresentation.”
Ernest Albert Brown (1857-1946) was born to Daniel Webster and Harriet Dunn (Smith) Brown in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a member of a clothing merchants firm, Whitman & Brown in New York City and Albert attended public schools. He later entered the Brooklyn Institute of Design, winning an award in 1873. During his time at the Institute, he also worked as a newspaper illustrator and later began painting for the theatre.
Albert started working for Harley Merry 1877, seven years after Burridge worked for Merry. In 1879 he painted the settings for the Wilcox Opera House in West Meriden, Connecticut and began to spread his wings a bit. By 1880, he was working as a scenic artist and art director at Pope’s Theater in St. Louis with his work attracting much attention. This became the springboard for Albert’s career and, like many of his contemporaries, he began to travel throughout the country, producing scenery for a variety of locales in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston.
Albert married Annie Elizabeth Bagwell (daughter of Edwin Bagwell of Brooklyn) on June 6, 1881 and officially changed his name to Ernest Albert the following year. They had four children: Ruby Frances, Elsie (M. Rodney Gibson); Edith Dorothy (m. Thaddeus A. V. Du Flon) and Ernest Albert. When first married, Albert worked in St. Louis and formed a partnership with Thomas C. Noxon and Patrick J. Toomey Noxon. Noxon & Toomey had started a studio in 1869. Noxon, Albert & Toomey expanded and ran studios in St. Louis, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois & Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The partnership dissolved in 1885 and Albert moved to Chicago, furnishing the settings for Thomas W. Keene’s production of “Hamlet” at the new Chicago Opera. Between 1885 and 1890, he mounted Shakespearean productions for Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett that included “Julius Ceasar,” “The Merchant of Venice” and Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Sunday, April 8, 1888, issue of the Inter Ocean newspaper noted “Noxon, Albert & Toomey have just completed the curtain for the Warder Grand Opera House in Kansas City. Their frames at the Haymarket are now burdened with the scenery for Booth & Barrett production of The Merchant of Venice for the next season.
Albert also created a transformation scene for “Babes in the Wood,” a Christmas Pantomime from Drury Lane Theatre in London, called “The Supremacy of the Sun.” The Chicago Tribune (Nov. 9, 1890, pg. 36) noted the producers of the scenery as Messrs. W. Telbin, T. E. Ryan, W. Perkins, E. J. Banks (all of London), Herr Kautsky (of the Imperial Opera-House, Vienna), John Buss and Ernest Albert of Chicago. On page 34 of the Sunday, Nov. 26, 1890 issue, the Chicago Tribune describes’ Albert’s transformation scene in great detail under the heading “It Appeals to the Eye. Babes in the Wood must be judged chiefly as spectacle.”
The Christmas pantomime ran at the Chicago Auditorium where Albert worked as the resident scenic artist. It presented “a series of magnificent stage pictures, testing for the first time the multitude of resources of the great stage, pictures sumptuous in quality, carefully toned in color, and singularly graceful in effect.” It continued to note that “These pictures have a certain marked advantage over any efforts of the painter’s brush; where his colors are stationary these are winged.” The final transformation scene, called “Supremacy of the Sun” was divided into five parts: Spirit of Snow, Ice Bound, Home of the North Wind, A Summer Idyll, and The Radiant Realm of the Sun God.
The transformation scene is described in great detail:
“The Supremacy of the Sun is proved by the disappearance of Arctic ice under its smile and the creation of a flowery golden world. Gradually through shifting scenes and lights the silver changes to gold, the cold greens and blues to warmer tones. A polar bear appears garlanded and driven by fairy-like children. Cupids descend from the golden skies, figures of nymphs and graces from below, and beyond a sunburst formed by the shimmer of brilliant lights on fluttering gold-leaf and pendent moving threads of gold. In the midst of this splendor rises a gay butterfly, and out of its wings the radiant Sun God himself, clad in shining garments and crowned with electric lights. In the meantime golden fans in the foreground have risen and collapsed, disclosing flowery groups of figures. The reducing curtain has disappeared, lending the full curve of the arch as a frame for the brilliant picture, whose gorgeous colors are shaded from the golden frieze down to the soft reds at the base. The color scheme of this last tableau is an effective completion of the house, the ivory and gold arches dotted with lights leading down with exquisite harmony to the stage indescribably radiant with iridescent gold and flowery colors. Ernest Albert, the talented scenic artist, is to be congratulated upon the beauty of this work. Certain of its effects would be unattainable on a stage of less elaborate mechanism.”
It was soon after this performance that the new studio of Albert, Grover & Burridge would be constructed with its twenty paint frames and display a display theatre to light completed scenes. The last line of the above article “certain effects would be unattainable on a stage of less elaborate mechanism” was one of the incentives for this innovate scenic studio and their subsequent participation in the Beckwith Memorial Theatre. The state-of-the art mechanism at the Chicago Civic Auditorium changed everything and set a new standard for scenic artists and stage machinists.
To be continued…
