Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

This unattributed painting, presumed to date from the early twentieth century, is part of a larger holding of oils and watercolors in the Theater Collection of the Museum of the City of New York depicting New York City playhouse interiors and urban-themed set designs. The scene derives from a lithograph -almost a century old when the painting was donated in 1932 -recording the extravaganza of Thomas Dartmouth Rice's fifty-seventh performance "jumping" and singing the role of Jim Crow to an overflow crowd at New York's American Theatre. The performance memorialized here probably took place on January 8, 1833, rather than the November date indicated as part of its title.¹

The origins of this blackface song-and-dance routine ("Turn a-bout and wheel a-bout, an' do jis so / An ebery time I turn about I jump & Jim Crow!") are legendary, if imperfectly documented.² Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808 -1860), born in New York, had been an itinerant performer of unexceptional reputation until 1828, when (according to the most recurrently cited sources) he stumbled upon the caricature concept for Jim Crow by observing the antics of an elderly and deformed African American stable hand in Kentucky. Rice appropriated the man's tunes, odd gait, costume, and mannerisms for a theatrical act. The novelty of that sketch not only regaled audiences but also catapulted Rice into a headliner, whose "Jim Crow" bookings quickly propelled him east from Louisville to engagements in Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore, and eventually landed him at the American Theatre in New York City on November 12, 1832.³

Braced by shrewd advance promotion, his billing there drew capacity crowds and box-office receipts that immediately legitimized Rice as the country's leading "Ethiopian delineator," the term preceding "minstrel performer." Rice's perennial Jim Crow tours through the United States and Great Britain brought the performer wealth, celebrity, and new opportunities for years thereafter.⁴ The act's popularity also matured Jim Crow into a perdurable racist stereotype, the term itself becoming wedged into the language as a reference to segregation codes endemic to the postbellum American South.

In the stratified world of New York City theaters, with their implicit class associations, the American Theatre, at the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery, was considered a middlebrow house. Designed by Ithiel Town with the innovative use of gas jets for interior lighting, it had opened in 1826 and, by the date of Rice's engagement, had been twice remodeled after fires. Three thousand patrons could be accommodated within its large central pit and four tiers of galleries, which reached across the house and down each side almost to the stage. In the Jacksonian era, urban theaters like the American Theatre had assumed new importance as democratic gathering spaces, in which ticket holders could not only relax but also vent political opinions publicly and intermingle with allies and enemies seated, depending on allegiances, in the more boisterous pit or costlier boxes. Ungovernable audiences often interrupted performances, with hilarious results in the case of Rice's curtain call.

This painting and its parent lithograph probably depict the final moment of a benefit performance featuring the incongruous pairing of Jim Crow with Shakespeare early in the 1833 season, when the American Theatre's management had booked the tragedian Junius Brutus Booth in a repertoire that included the battle scene from Richard III. Near anarchy erupted when hundreds of playgoers, joined by cast members dressed as soldiers for the fifth act's battle scene, scrambled forward to encircle Rice during his interact skit, tampering with the scenery and evidently breaking into fisticuffs.⁵ The image creates a powerful, paradoxical association between the burnt-cork-faced impersonator of a jocular black man and white male aggression as personified by the urban ruffians and gentry who have surged onto the theater stage.

Notes:

1 A contemporary copy of this antebellum-era print, headed American Theatre Bowery New York, is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. Its subtitle reads: View of the Stage on the Fifty-seventh Night of Mr. T. D. Rice of Kentucky in His Original and Celebrated Extravaganza of JIM CROW on Which Occasion Every Department of the House Was Thronged to an Excess Unprecedented in the Records of Theatrical Attraction. New York 25th November 1833. Contemporary research into the featured bills for the American Theatre in 1833, however, points to January 8, 1833, as the more probable date of the incident pictured. That evening represented the closing of Rice's initial run at the American Theatre, his debut having occurred fifty-seven nights earlier, on November 12, 1832. An announcement in the New York Evening Post for January 8, 1833, advertised the American Theatre bill as a special performance celebrating the Battle of New Orleans, followed by a series of scenes including the fourth act of The Hunchback and the fifth act of Richard III. Next, "Mr. Rice will appear and sing his celebrated Extravaganza of jim crow, being the last night of his engagement."

2 For a thorough discussion of the history of Rice's synthesis of the Jim Crow caricature and the meaning of the routine's unprecedented popularity among antebellum audiences in the urban American North, see Dale Cockrell, "Jim Crow," Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 62 -91; and for an alternate interpretation of "blacking up," see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3 In George C.D. Odell's Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), vol. 3, p. 633, Rice's arrival at the American Theatre was said to take place on November 12, 1832, with his first benefit performance, "in which he personated the six characters in A Day after the Fair," recorded on November 17.

4 In later life, Rice suffered from a stroke, which for a time deprived him of speech and the use of his legs. By the early 1850s he had recovered sufficiently to be cast in a theatrical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and to perform with Henry Wood's Minstrel Company. He died in New York in 1860.

5 William T. Porter, a critic of the period who covered entertainment news for the elite journal Spirit of the Times, occasionally "slummed" at shows presented at New York's working-class theaters. Dale Cockrell ("Jim Crow," pp. 31 -32) reproduces Porter's account of the spectators crowding on stage, commingling with the actors and props, during a performance of Richard III at the American Theatre in 1832.


American Theatre, Bowery, New York, November 25th, 1833, 57th Night of T. D. (Jim Crow) Rice n.d. (depicting 1833) Artist unknown Oil on canvas, 27¹/5 X 36¹/5 Gift of Mr. Carl F. Grieshaber, 32.483
This unattributed painting, presumed to date from the early twentieth century, is part of a larger holding of oils and watercolors in the Theater Collection of the Museum of the City of New York depicting New York City playhouse interiors and urban-themed set designs. The scene derives from a lithograph -almost a century old when the painting was donated in 1932 -recording the extravaganza of Thomas Dartmouth Rice's fifty-seventh performance "jumping" and singing the role of Jim Crow to an overflow crowd at New York's American Theatre. The performance memorialized here probably took place on January 8, 1833, rather than the November date indicated as part of its title.¹ The origins of this blackface song-and-dance routine ("Turn a-bout and wheel a-bout, an' do jis so / An ebery time I turn about I jump & Jim Crow!") are legendary, if imperfectly documented.² Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808 -1860), born in New York, had been an itinerant performer of unexceptional reputation until 1828, when (according to the most recurrently cited sources) he stumbled upon the caricature concept for Jim Crow by observing the antics of an elderly and deformed African American stable hand in Kentucky. Rice appropriated the man's tunes, odd gait, costume, and mannerisms for a theatrical act. The novelty of that sketch not only regaled audiences but also catapulted Rice into a headliner, whose "Jim Crow" bookings quickly propelled him east from Louisville to engagements in Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore, and eventually landed him at the American Theatre in New York City on November 12, 1832.³ Braced by shrewd advance promotion, his billing there drew capacity crowds and box-office receipts that immediately legitimized Rice as the country's leading "Ethiopian delineator," the term preceding "minstrel performer." Rice's perennial Jim Crow tours through the United States and Great Britain brought the performer wealth, celebrity, and new opportunities for years thereafter.⁴ The act's popularity also matured Jim Crow into a perdurable racist stereotype, the term itself becoming wedged into the language as a reference to segregation codes endemic to the postbellum American South. In the stratified world of New York City theaters, with their implicit class associations, the American Theatre, at the corner of Canal Street and the Bowery, was considered a middlebrow house. Designed by Ithiel Town with the innovative use of gas jets for interior lighting, it had opened in 1826 and, by the date of Rice's engagement, had been twice remodeled after fires. Three thousand patrons could be accommodated within its large central pit and four tiers of galleries, which reached across the house and down each side almost to the stage. In the Jacksonian era, urban theaters like the American Theatre had assumed new importance as democratic gathering spaces, in which ticket holders could not only relax but also vent political opinions publicly and intermingle with allies and enemies seated, depending on allegiances, in the more boisterous pit or costlier boxes. Ungovernable audiences often interrupted performances, with hilarious results in the case of Rice's curtain call. This painting and its parent lithograph probably depict the final moment of a benefit performance featuring the incongruous pairing of Jim Crow with Shakespeare early in the 1833 season, when the American Theatre's management had booked the tragedian Junius Brutus Booth in a repertoire that included the battle scene from Richard III. Near anarchy erupted when hundreds of playgoers, joined by cast members dressed as soldiers for the fifth act's battle scene, scrambled forward to encircle Rice during his interact skit, tampering with the scenery and evidently breaking into fisticuffs.⁵ The image creates a powerful, paradoxical association between the burnt-cork-faced impersonator of a jocular black man and white male aggression as personified by the urban ruffians and gentry who have surged onto the theater stage. Notes: 1 A contemporary copy of this antebellum-era print, headed American Theatre Bowery New York, is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. Its subtitle reads: View of the Stage on the Fifty-seventh Night of Mr. T. D. Rice of Kentucky in His Original and Celebrated Extravaganza of JIM CROW on Which Occasion Every Department of the House Was Thronged to an Excess Unprecedented in the Records of Theatrical Attraction. New York 25th November 1833. Contemporary research into the featured bills for the American Theatre in 1833, however, points to January 8, 1833, as the more probable date of the incident pictured. That evening represented the closing of Rice's initial run at the American Theatre, his debut having occurred fifty-seven nights earlier, on November 12, 1832. An announcement in the New York Evening Post for January 8, 1833, advertised the American Theatre bill as a special performance celebrating the Battle of New Orleans, followed by a series of scenes including the fourth act of The Hunchback and the fifth act of Richard III. Next, "Mr. Rice will appear and sing his celebrated Extravaganza of jim crow, being the last night of his engagement." 2 For a thorough discussion of the history of Rice's synthesis of the Jim Crow caricature and the meaning of the routine's unprecedented popularity among antebellum audiences in the urban American North, see Dale Cockrell, "Jim Crow," Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 62 -91; and for an alternate interpretation of "blacking up," see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3 In George C.D. Odell's Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), vol. 3, p. 633, Rice's arrival at the American Theatre was said to take place on November 12, 1832, with his first benefit performance, "in which he personated the six characters in A Day after the Fair," recorded on November 17. 4 In later life, Rice suffered from a stroke, which for a time deprived him of speech and the use of his legs. By the early 1850s he had recovered sufficiently to be cast in a theatrical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and to perform with Henry Wood's Minstrel Company. He died in New York in 1860. 5 William T. Porter, a critic of the period who covered entertainment news for the elite journal Spirit of the Times, occasionally "slummed" at shows presented at New York's working-class theaters. Dale Cockrell ("Jim Crow," pp. 31 -32) reproduces Porter's account of the spectators crowding on stage, commingling with the actors and props, during a performance of Richard III at the American Theatre in 1832.