Part 385: Sosman & Landis – “Working Slapdash Fashion”
In 1889 W. J. Lawrence suggested that the English school of scenic art in America was superior when he wrote the article “Scenery and Scenic Artists” for “The Gentleman’s Magazine.” It was republished in “The Theatre” (July 13, 1889, page 371-374). Lawrence wrote, “Not only are English scene painters, at the present day, unrivalled in the several departments of their art, but instances are not wanting to show that they have improved the technique and carried their reformation into other countries.” The “improved technique” was the practice of glazing that had replaced the application of the European technique solid colors on backdrops in some schools, but not all American scenic artists adopted the glazing technique.
Two years later, the American scenic artist Arthur Palmer suggested that the English school of scenic art in America was far superior to that from any other country, writing, “English scenic artists as a class possess a breadth and freedom of style that are unequaled by those of any other nationality. These qualities, which are the highest excellences in scene painting, are especially noticeable in their landscapes, which are simply unapproachable, possessing, as they do at once a beauty, a realism and a fidelity to nature which we look for in vain in the work of the scenic artists of any other land” (“The Morning Call,” San Francisco, CA, 22 February 1891, page 13).
Palmer’s and Lawrence’s comments are part of the growing evidence that suggests there was the not only the development of two distinct schools of scenic art in America, but also the competition between the schools. There were those who were adhered to the English school of glazing and those who adhered to the Central European tradition of solid colors, and “never the twain shall meet.” By the late nineteenth century, the Central European school was the predominant one in the Midwestern United States, and subsequently, driving the market. By the 1890s, Chicago was major theatrical manufacturing center, remaining steeped in the European traditions of solids colors. When considering the thousands of backdrops produced by Midwestern scenic artists, it is apparent that they were guiding the accepted aesthetic in the region by sheer volume. If you also consider the influx of immigrants from Europe and Scandinavia to the Midwest at this time, there is a further support of the European painting traditions. Remember that in 1885, twenty of Europe’s top panorama artists were brought to the Milwaukee to work for the American Panorama Company (see installments #276-281). Many scenic artists would work as both theatre artists and panorama artists during the late-nineteenth century. This migration also points to the development of large studios that employed dozens of artists, all needing to worked together and share a similar approach.
In Lawrence’s article, he also commented about the work of scenic studios, and he was not complimentary about the rapidity of their process or the final product. The last section of Lawrence’s article specifically addresses the hundreds of stock scenery installation by the scenery by the firm of Sosman & Landis. Here is what Lawrence wrote in 1889:
“Paradoxically enough, America enjoys at once the somewhat equivocal honor of having elevated scene painting to the highest pitch of artistic excellence on the one hand, and degraded it to the lowest level of mechanical production on the other. While the leading scenic artists, attached or otherwise, have improved the technique by a judicious blend of the various European systems, commercial enterprise and the universal custom of touring have occasioned the upraising of several scenic depots where orders from the innumerable small theatres which abound in the States are completed “with promptitude and dispatch.” Under existing circumstances it is conceivable that the lessee of every miserable little “opera-house” (Americanese for lecture-hall) in Southern America cannot afford to keep a scenic artist on the premises. To meet the demands for the new stocks of scenery which are generally laid in when the little theatre is first erected, several scenic firms have sprung up in St. Louis, Chicago, Kansas and elsewhere, which employ artists of marked inferiority and turn out work which bears as much resemblance to the genuine article as a chromo does to an oil-painting. Produced almost entirely by mechanical means, no wonder it has been facetiously dubbed “patent medicine scenery.” In this way the firm of Sosman and Landis of Chicago, which employs about twenty-five “artists,” has in the course of nine years supplied upwards of a thousand places of entertainment with complete stocks of scenery. That such work falls short of the domain of art is clearly proven by the fact that it is not unusual for these firms to receive an order by telegraph in the morning for a scene, say thirty feet square, which will be completed dried, and sent on its way to the purchaser before nightfall. So far as the scenic depot is concerned the days of glazing and second painting are gone forever. What matters is that the adoption of the broadest system of treatment possible – working slapdash fashion in a full body colors- makes the painting crude and garish? All the more merit: for the average provincial American gives his vote for gaudiness and plenty of it.”
Ouch.
To be continued…
