In Front of a Theater

In Front of a Theater (プロクター座前 / Proctor's Theater) is a 1922 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted in New York during his Art Students League years. The title refers to one of the Proctor's vaudeville theaters that operated across Manhattan and the outer boroughs in the 1910s and 1920s — a chain of B. F. Keith's vaudeville houses that dominated mass entertainment in New York before the rise of motion picture palaces. The composition shows a crowd of theatergoers gathered on the sidewalk in front of the marquee, with the bright signage of the theater above and the deep darks of the surrounding street walls framing the composition. The mixture of evening artificial light, urban crowd, and commercial entertainment architecture places the painting squarely within the Ashcan vocabulary of John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn — a vocabulary Shimizu absorbed directly from Sloan at the Art Students League. The painting is part of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts collection of his New York paintings, and it is reproduced from a public-domain scan on Wikimedia Commons.