Realistic Spectacle: Arthur Voegtlin's Nineteenth-Century Stagecraft at the New York Hippodrome

Abstract

Arthur Voegtlin (1858–1948) designed and oversaw the construction and painting of all the major sets for the New York Hippodrome's first season, from an archway formed by two rearing dragons in the courtyard of a Martian king to the grounds of a military academy at the start of the American Civil War. In this essay, I consider the ways that Voegtlin's sets navigated the distance between fantasy and verisimilitude, bringing together his experience painting sets for immersive, spectacular works with his training as a scene painter for the realistic interiors of the legitimate theatre's comedies and dramas. Voegtlin drew on those techniques to establish the mise en scène of realistic spectacle for which the New York Hippodrome became known. Voegtlin's appeals to photographic accuracy, acute awareness about how he needed to account for the size and scale of the space for which he was designing, and sense of the audience member's embodiment (particularly in relation to that of an amusement park spectator and a viewer of modern paintings) all demonstrate how Voegtlin saw his set designs at the Hippodrome as an extension of the dramatic principles he embraced throughout this period.