Similarly, in Kronberg’s At the Ballet (n.d.) the viewer occupies an opera box with two attentive audience members [Fig. 1.18]. Kronberg depicts a pair of opera glasses perched on the railing of the box; presumably they are meant to be the viewer’s thus further inviting the spectator into the scene. Upon the stage a ballerina holding a bouquet takes a bow, and, in the lower left hand corner of the painting, the scroll of the double-bass peeks out from the orchestra pit below. The inclusion of a portion of the bass-viol is one Degas employed often. In a late work, Dancer on Stage (c. 1894) he juxtaposes the graceful figure of the dancer with the elegant curves of the scroll of the instrument [Fig. 1.19]. Shinn, too, applied this motif to similar ends in A French Music Hall (1906) [Fig. 1.20] and Dancer in White Before the Footlights (1910) [Fig. 1.21]. Kronberg’s, Shinn’s and Degas’s images that include the dancers on the stage, the musicians in the pit, and construct the viewer as an audience member contain multiple levels of looking. While the audience observes the stage, the viewer of the painting observes the observers as well as the performers. The subject is the ambience of the theater with its metropolitan crowd, black-coated musicians, and gauzy ballerinas frozen on a stage bathed in unnatural light.
Shinn’s and Kronberg’s contemporaries recognized the influence of Degas in their art. In 1906 Albert E. Gallatin cautioned artists in their adaptation of Degas’s style, writing: “In Degas, then, the student can learn much; but let him be wary, for if he follows Degas too closely the result will be but gross caricature.”14
14 A.E. Gallatin, "Studio-Talk," International Studio 30, no. 117 (November 1906): 84. However, Gallatin felt that Shinn, though “greatly influenced by Degas … has only gone to Degas for inspiration, for ideas, not slavishly and unintelligently to copy him. He has learnt to see things from Degas’s point of view; he too now sees the artistic
15
possibilities of the gas-lighted music-hall.”15 That same year Sadakichi Hartmann wrote of
Kronberg, “Some critics have called him the American Degas. But there is only the similarity of
subject, the treatment is quite a different one.”