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Notes on John Joseph Holland, with a Design for the Balitmore Theatre, 1802

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Richard Stoddard
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Extract

John Joseph Holland, one of the most prominent scene painters of the early American theatre, was born in England about 1776 and apprenticed at the age of nine to Gaetano Marinari, chief artist at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. “For upwards of forty years,” George Raymond recalled, Marinari “was accounted one of the first scene painters in Europe.” He trained Holland in scene painting and architecture, and the young artist taught himself landscape painting in watercolors. Soon after his apprenticeship was over, Holland went to Convent Garden, where he was employed from August, 1794, to February, 1795, but he later returned to the King's Theatre, where Thomas Wignell found him in 1796 and engaged him for the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , May 1971 , pp. 58 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1971

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References

Notes

1 Memoirs of Robert William Elliston, Comedian, 2 vols. (London, 1844–1845), I, 175–176Google Scholar.

2 Dunlap, William, History of the American Theatre (New York, 1832), pp. 191–192, 344–45Google Scholar. See also Dunlap's, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, ed. Bayley, Frank W. and Goodspeed, Charles E., 3 vols. (Boston, 1918), II, 197–198Google Scholar; Rosenfeld, Sybil and Croft-Murray, Edward, “A Checklist of Scene Painters Working in Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th Century,” Parts 2 and 4. Theatre Notebook, XIX (Winter 1964–1965), 63, (Summer 1965), 134–35Google Scholar. For citations to articles on Holland's non-theatrical work, see Groce, George C. and Wallace, David H., The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860 (New Haven, 1957), p. 322Google Scholar.

3 Rosenfeld and Croft-Murray, “Checklist (4),” p. 136; Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, p. 115; Durang, John, The Memoir of John Durang, ed. Downer, Alan S. (Pittsburgh, 1966), p. 108Google Scholar. Groce, and Wallace, , Dictionary, p. 443Google Scholar, cite references to artists named C. Milbourn, Cotton Milbourne, and Charles C. Milbourne, as well as a Milbourne who painted scenery—all of whom were active in Philadelphia or New York from 1794 to 1811.

4 United States Gazette [Philadelphia], May 10, 1800 (Pizarro) and February 23, 1802 (Hercules and Omphale); Relfs Philadelphia Gazette, March 18, 1806 (Holland's benefit).

5 Dunlap, , History of the American Theatre, pp. 191–192, 339, 343–44Google Scholar; Odell, George C.D., Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York, 1927–1949), II, 291Google Scholar, quoting Evening Post, August 28, 1807.

6 Hamlin, Talbot, Benjamin Henry Latrobe (New York, 1955), pp. 190, 271Google Scholar.

7 Dunlap, William, Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839), 3 vols. (New York, 1930), II, 396, 400–403Google Scholar; Dunlap, , History of the American Theatre, p. 340Google Scholar. Ciceri was homesick anyway—he told Dunlap he felt like “a banish'd man.”

8 Dunlap, , Diary, II, 438Google Scholar.

9 Odell, , Annals, II, 413–425, 447–49Google Scholar; Dunlap, , History of the American Theatre, p. 361Google Scholar.

10 .New-York Columbian, September 5, 1816, describes the Park alterations, and March 5, 1819, advertises Holland's benefit. His death (“after a lingering illness”) was noticed in the New-York Evening Post, December 18, 1820. Holland's first wife, an Englishwoman, died in Philadelphia; his second wife was the daughter of a Mr. Jackson of Staten Island (Dunlap, , Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, II, 197–198)Google Scholar. He left no children. A portrait of Holland, attributed to Dunlap, is reproduced in Dunlap's, Diary, II, 574Google Scholar.

11 Rosenfeld, Sybil, “The Eidophusikon Illustrated,” Theatre Notebook, XVIII (Winter 1963–1964), 52–54Google Scholar; Rosenfeld, and Croft-Murray, , “Checklist (3),” Theatre Notebook, XIX (Spring, 1965), 110–111Google Scholar. It may be noted that Milbourne had worked with Loutherbourg at Covent Garden in 1785–1786 (Rosenfeld, Sybil, “Scene Painters at the London Theatres in the 18th Century,” Theatre Notebook, XX [Spring 1966], 116)Google Scholar.

12 Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, May 30, 1805. A similar panorama of the expedition against Tripoli was exhibited as late as 1830, in St. Louis; see McDermott, John F., The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi (Chicago, 1958), p. 9Google Scholar.

13 Playbill, Harvard Theatre Collection.

14 Theatrical Censor & Critical Miscellany, VII (01 1806), 65–66Google Scholar.

15 “The Philadelphia Stage,” clipped from the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854–57, at the Harvard Theatre Collection; Chap. XXXIX.

16 Metropolitan Museum, accession no. 46.100.25; 16 3/4″ by 12 1/2″. The Museum cataloguers, unable to make sense of Holland's cryptic legend, were apparently under the impression that the design was simply an architectural drawing. The Print Department at the Museum has at least twenty-one more drawings and water colors attributed to Holland (accession nos. 46.100.11–24, 26–31, 33), most of them undated and unidentified, and many unfinished. Of them only one clearly resembles a scene design: No. 46.100.20, painted in water colors on both sides of the paper, displays on one side an unidentified sketch of a dark cavern with a rude stairway in the background, moldering gravestones on the earthen floor, and a shadowy female figure in the center foreground. The remaining drawings include several architectural elevations, among them a Gothic church doorway and churchyard that could have served as a design for the graveyard scene in Hamlet; thirteen landscapes, one of which has been catalogued with the query, “Design for a stage set?” but seems quite untheatrical; and a number of elevations of institutional buildings, some in Gothic style, one marked “For the London Society” and dated 1812.

17 Nicoll, Allardyce, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1952–1959), IV, 345Google Scholar.

18 Odell, , Annals, II, 132–133Google Scholar; Gazette of the United States, April 12, 1802. On the first night only of the Philadelphia production, Thomas A. Cooper played Ulric. I have been unable to locate a playbill for the Philadelphia premiere; a bill for a revival at the Chestnut, December 17, 1802, is in the Library Company of Philadelphia, but it makes no reference to new scenery or to the scene painter. Newspaper advertisements also lack references to the scenery.

19 Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, June 10, 1802Google Scholar.

20 Lewis, Matthew G., Adelmorn, the Outlaw (London, 1801)Google Scholar. The title-page differs from Nicoll in dating the London premiere May 4, 1801.

21 Rosenfeld, and Croft-Murray, , “Checklist (1),” Theatre Notebook, XIX (Autumn 1964), 14Google Scholar.

22 Alden, John, “A Season in Federal Street: J.B. Williamson and the Boston Theatre, 1796–1797,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, LXV, Part I (1955), 44–45Google Scholar.

23 Playbill in extra-illustrated Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, ed. Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, II, No. 10, at the Harvard Theatre Collection.

24 Reproduced in McNamara, Brooks, The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar.