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Double Vision: Second Empire Theatre in Stereographs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Laurence Senelick
Laurence Senelick
Affiliation:
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University
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Extract

Of cherry-wood or pressed tin, lined with red plush or gutta-percha, hand-held or mounted in a self-standing case, the stereoscope was, by the mid-1850s, ubiquitous in the Victorian parlor, where the viewing device and its attendant cards provided an inoffensive and instructive amusement. ‘The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing-room’, reported the Art Journal of 1856, ‘philosophers talk learnedly upon it; ladies are delighted with its magic representations; and children play with it.’

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 83 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999

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References

Notes

1. Hunt, Robert, Art Journal (03 1856), p. 188Google Scholar, quoted in Earle, Edward W., Points of Views: The Stereograph in America—A Cultural History (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979), p. 28.Google Scholar

2. Darrah, William C., The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, Pa.: W. C. Darrah, 1977), p. 11Google Scholar; Wing, Paul, ‘The French Theatrical Tissues’, Stereo World 5, 5 (November–December 1982), pp. 4–14Google Scholar; Wing, Paul, ‘Les Theatres [sic] de Paris’, Stereo World 18, 1 (March–April 1991), pp. 4–12.Google Scholar

3. Detailed reproductions but no informed commentary are provided in Remise, Jac, Diableries. La Vie quotidienne chez Satan à la fin du 19e siècle (Poitiers: Ballard, 1978).Google Scholar

4. Norton, Russell, ‘Preliminary checklist of French stereo card photographers and publishers’, The Photographic Collector 5, 3 (1982), p. 280Google Scholar; Bénézit, E., Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculptures, dessinateurs & graveurs … 3 vols. (Paris: R Roger & F. Chernoviz, 1913) I, p. 1024; E, p. 528.Google Scholar

5. Pellerin, Denis, La Photographie stéréoscopique sous le Second Empire (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1995), pp. 104, 108.Google Scholar Russell Norton thinks that B.K. manufactured tissues for others and gradually acquired the rights to the negatives (Norton, ‘Preliminary checklist…’).

6. Norton, , ‘Preliminary checklist …’, p. 290.Google Scholar

7. Helmholtz, Hermann von, ‘Perception of Depth’, Physiological Optics (1867) IIIGoogle Scholar, quoted in Earle, , Points of Views, p. 40.Google Scholar

8. Senelick, Laurence, ‘Eroticism in Early Theatrical Photography’, Theatre History Studies 11 (1991), pp. 1–50.Google Scholar

9. Œuvres de théâtre de Diderot (1772), quoted in Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 42.Google Scholar Meisel reproduces a number of Hogarthian sequences; for a good selection of Morität sequences, see Kohlmann, Theodor, ed., Traurige Schicksale der Liebe. Moritätentafeln (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1982).Google Scholar

10. Mainardi, Patricia, Art and Politics of the Second Empire. The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 190.Google Scholar

11. Of the shows illustrated stereoscopically, many had their first performance or a major revival in the 1860s and early 1870s. The operas include Faust (Théâtre-Lyrique, 1859; first performance at the Opéra 1869); L'Africaine (1865); Hamlet (Opéra, 1869); Les Huguenots (500th performance, 4 April 1872); Aïda (Théâtre-Italien, 1876). The operettas include Barbe-Bleue (Variétés, 1866) and Rip Van Winkle (Folies-Dramatiques, 1884). The féeries include La Biche au bois (revived by Marc Fournier, Porte St-Martin, 1865); Peau d'âne (Gaîté, 1865); Cendrillon, ou La Pantoufle merveilleuse (Châtelet, 1866); La Chatte blanche (two major revivals in 1870 at the Châtelet and Gaîté); Les Mille et Une Nuits (Châtelet, 1881). The ballets include Yedda (Opéra, 1879).

12. Wild, Nicole, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens au xixe siècle. Les Théâtres et la musique (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), p. 76.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., pp. 149, 172, 261, 273.

14. Brockway, Wallace and Weinstock, Herbert, The World of Opera (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), pp. 215–16.Google Scholar Josef Gregor, in an anti-Semitic, anti-Gallic commentary on Meyerbeer, draws parallels between the grandiloquence of his operas and Louis Napoléon's political ambitions. (Kulturgeschichte der Oper. Ihre Verbindung mit dem Leben den Werken des Geistes und der Politik [Vienna: Gallus, 1941], pp. 319–22.)

15. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, Atlantic Monthly 3 (06 1859), pp. 747–8.Google Scholar

16. Méliès was born in 1863, and the great period of the féerie was over by the time he had reached the age of reason; by 1875 it was evolving into science fiction, with the Offenbach-Verne extravaganza Le Voyage à la lune. See Ginisty, Paul, La Féerie (Paris: Michaud, 1910), p. 214Google Scholar, as well as Kovács, Katherine Singer, ‘Georges Méliès and the féerié’, in Film Before Griffith, edited by Fell, John L. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 244–57.Google Scholar