7. Two Paintings at The Met

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

While I was doing some online research these past weeks I came across two paintings, which both had connections to Philadelphia Theater History. Although I’ve been teaching and thinking about this subject for a while, frankly, I had not seen them before. And I don’t know how they had escaped my attention, but in my defense they were hiding in the obscurity of the online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tiny institution in New York. So.

But I have seen them now, and because I am even more full of recently acquired knowledge about early Philadelphia, the meaning of these two paintings was apparent to me. So I’m going to discuss and examine them today. And guess what? I think we’re even breaking some new ground here with one of them! I’m making a little contribution to Art History as well as Theater History because I think I’ve found something that nobody’s even published before. Now, if I’m wrong about that, and it’s already written down in somebody’s PhD thesis or published in an academic conference paper or book somewhere, my hat’s off them. All right, here we go . . . 

Okay, so what am I talking about? Well if you look at the show notes, you’ll see the link to the online images of these two paintings (watercolors, technically) which are not currently on public display at The Met, but their crackerjack team of online curators have kindly placed them at our disposal, free of charge. I have also put the link in the blog for this episode, number 7, on the show’s website: aithpodcast.com

Both watercolors are rather small, about 23 by 17 centimeters, and were done by John Lewis Krimmel. Born in the German duchy of Wurttemberg in 1786, and he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1809 to join his older brother in a business venture. But he soon decided to become a painter instead and he studied at the Pennsylvania  Academy of Fine Art, and joined a sketch club along with such other Philadelphia painters such as Thomas Sully and Rembrandt Peale.

Krimmel specialized in what is known as ‘genre painting’ - scenes of everyday life, often with comic and vivid contemporary details. He did some full oil paintings of things like country weddings, Fourth of July Celebrations, and street scenes. He did a lot - a lot - of watercolors of landscapes, street vendors, church meetings, that sort of thing. He’s sometimes referred to as “America’s Hogarth,” after the English painter William Hogarth, because of his rather merry and wry approach to pointing up the amusing and slightly scandalous nature of the world around him.

Well, the world around Krimmel was early 19th Century Pennsylvania, which was a fascinating place to a newly arrived immigrant from Central Europe. And one of the aspects of American life that particularly fascinated newly arrived immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe was the diversity of its population. Krimmel loved to sketch and paint scenes which included many African American residents of Philadelphia, which to him were an arresting and novel part of living in the New World, and he wasn't going to ignore them, he was going to feature them. Krimmel’s paintings and drawings, in fact, stand out in that respect.

Because if you spend some time looking, as I have done recently at a lot of the published and finely-wrought ‘scenes of Philadelphia’ around 1800, ones that are made by white Americans or English artists, you often see elegantly dressed people strolling along the sidewalk in front of great public buildings. And the people depicted are elegantly dressed white people, almost exclusively, I’m sorry to say.

Now, this can’t have been correct in real life, because we know that in 1810 ten percent of the city of Philadelphia’s population was made up of free African Americans and they lived in every neighborhood of the city. Occasionally, in these drawings I’m mentioning, you will see one or two Black men or women in the corner of the fame, never more than a few. Usually if it’s a Black man being portrayed, he’s an oyster-vendor with a wheelbarrow of steamed oysters - which was in fact a common sight on Philadelphia’s streets of the era. Though they had been deliberately excluded from artistic depictions and cruelly driven out of many trades and businesses of the day, Blacks were very prominent in food service and catering, and many thrived and even grew rich in it. At the entry-level, if you could get a wheelbarrow, and get a load of fresh oysters, you could run them around the streets and sell them.

And finally, now, finally, this is where the theater turns up in this story. The New Theater, on 6th and Chestnut Street, was a well-known spot for oyster vendors in early 19th Century Philadelphia. The New Theater’s shows always started about 6 pm, three or four times a week. Well that was around dinner time, and a lot of people were rushing from their workplaces to see the evening’s performance. They didn’t have time to get dinner at home, there really weren’t restaurants then, so they purchased fast food! A pocketful of oysters from the barrow vendors, who knew to wait outside the theater for customers - who then either ate them on the spot or carried them indoors. Now I don’t know how you juggle oysters on the shell in a packed theater bench and get them into your mouth, but apparently Philadelphians did - though one theater-goer of the day complained that when he dashed out to buy some oysters in order to get some dinner for his wife and son who were waiting inside, he was so crowded and jostled in the busy and narrow doors of the New Theater building that by the time he got to his seat “they were nothing but shrimps.”

Now, enterprising Black oyster vendors would also gather when the play was over and the theater let out its crowd, disbursing hundreds of hungry people into the street.

But the other trade that the New Theatre attracted on the night it was hosting performances was: the Sex Trade. Now I hope I don’t threaten my Family Friendly podcast rating with this news, but in the 18th and 19th Centuries, theaters were famous for being a place where, if you were so inclined, you could meet prostitutes (especially female, but males, too). These prostitutes openly paraded around the upper galleries of theaters in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, London, Paris. Everybody knew it. It’s not a happy fact of life, but it’s a reality that many women had found the sex trade as their only economic means of survival - no one went into it happily, I’m sure. But it was one of the reasons why ‘respectable’ people stayed only in their enclosed boxes during the show, and why there were separate entrances for the boxes and the galleries . . . and frankly why many other people not so interested in respectability headed straight for the pit and the gallery. That’s what they wanted to do. Or these sex workers, as we call them now, might linger purposefully in the street after the show, next to some friendly oyster-barrow man, and engage homeward-bound theatergoers in a little badinage and light sexual solicitation. 

And that is precisely what Krimmel shows us, in the first of our two theater history-related paintings for today. Take a look at it if you can, but I’ll do my best to describe it.

It is night. We see five people gathered around an oyster barrow on the South side of Chestnut Street. In the background is the New Theatre, with its Benjamin Latrobe-designed portico that had replaced the ungainly wooden porch in 1804. The two statues of Tragedy and Comedy - which Philadelphia sculptor William Rush had carved - are standing high above. 

Down on the street, to the left stands the Black oyster vendor, rather elegantly dressed with a tie and top hat, with an apron covering the front of his russet orange jacket, has a knife in hand, shucking an oyster. Immediately to his right a White man in a brown suit is hungrily downing some of his wares. In the center of the group, holding a candle aloft which brightly illuminates her face and rather ample figure is a woman in a blue dress, smiling invitingly. An open bottle rests on the edge of the barrow in front of her. The oyster-man gazes at her in a friendly manner, as if they are old friends or at least common acquaintances in the late night world of  Philadelphia. Interestingly his pose rather mimics that of the statue of Tragedy above and behind him. While the young woman, her arm raised up high to hold the candle she has likely picked up off the oyster seller’s cart, mirrors the pose of Comedy, which is above her. With her other hand she extends an empty plate to the oyster seller, as if requesting another serving.

To the right of the picture, engaged in conversation with the woman are two young White men, in fashionable short coats, low tophats, and tight trousers. Typical evening wear for going to the theater for a night of fun. Though one of the men’s backs is turned to us as he points at the barrow of oysters, the other man on the far right, his left arm delicately crooked and holding an oyster aloft, is smiling meaningfully at the woman, a finger of his right hand poised to his lips.

We know, for a fact, that Black Philadelphians did also attend the theater and the circus in these times, in the 1790s in fact they could sit anywhere in the house, and many White Philadelphians found themselves sitting next to their fellow African American citizens, something they were increasingly unlikely to do at other public places like churches, schools, or Masonic lodges, which were had all become segregated in the decade before this. Although I’m sorry to report that by this point even in the New Theatre, Black people were mostly restricted to the upper galleries, and that really sadly there were never any professional Black performers on the stage itself (indeed Black roles were always done by white actors in blackface)  But it is true that in Philadelphia of this period the theater was one of the last places where White and Black people might meet together, they might have a social moment, an exchange of common feeling. This was to change inexorably in the years ahead, but in this image, Krimmel has recorded for us, in front of a theater, a small moment of grace in Philadelphia’s streets, albeit one based upon the frank commercial exchange of the two basic needs of everyone’s existence: food and sex.

Now let’s turn to the other of Krimmel’s watercolors. The people in this one are quite different, to say the least. It’s not a mixed race crowd, and it shows neither White nor Black people, everyone in this picture is a Native American - Indians, as other Americans called them back then. In addition to being fascinated by African Americans, Krimmel, the young man from Wurttemberg, was also really really excited about seeing real indigenous people of the New World and drawing them.

The title of his picture - as it’s listed here - is “Exhibition of Indian Tribal Ceremonies at the Olympic Theater, Philadelphia.” It is dated on the Met’s website as being completed “between 1811 and 1813,” and that may be, but I think I can tell them that I am not sure they have got the story of this image exactly right. On the webpage right now (as of this reporting, at least), we find the following text: 

“In a watercolor produced for Pavel Petrovich Svinyin’s ‘A Picturesque Voyage in North America’ (1815), Krimmel illustrated Svinyin’s account of an American Indian dance ceremony at an 1812 tribal delegation meeting in Philadelphia. Scholars have not, however, been able to document the occurrence of such a meeting. Svinyin may have invented this narrative by combining details from two 1804 performances: one staged by an Osage delegation for Thomas Jefferson during a visit to Washington, D.C., and another a few weeks later by the same tribal representatives at New York City’s Vauxhall Gardens. Krimmel, like Svinyin, had never witnessed such an event in person. Working with the sources he had at hand, he derived the figures in his council scene from works by Benjamin West and from anatomical studies he had done as a student in Philadelphia.”

No doubt the curators are correct about how Krimmel borrowed poses and anatomical studies from the sources they mention, they know their trade far better than me. But they are likely wrong about Krimmel, and about this meeting - and even Svinyin. They saw an event, something happened, all right, even if it didn’t look exactly like this picture.

Pavel Petrovich Svinyin? Who was Svinyin? Okay, I promise, we’ll get back to him.

First let’s also examine the assertion from The Met that Krimmel was drawing inspiration for his work from stories about tribal meetings of Native Americans in New York and Washington. I don’t think that’s correct! Why would he, when lots of people living in Philadelphia back then could tell him about the time Indians had performed ON STAGE in Philadelphia in just a few years before he arrived in town?

A little background: Throughout the late 18th and early 19th Century, there was a lot of conflict between white settlers and Native American tribes who lived in the Ohio River Valley - hundreds of miles to the west of Philadelphia. These included the Miami, the Pottawattamie, The Shawnee, the Kickapoo, the Weas, and others. In fact, the remnants of the Leni Lenape, the original people who had inhabited Eastern Pennsylvania and the land that by now was Philadelphia, had largely retreated by this point in time to Ohio. The chiefs of many of these tribes had signed a treaty in Philadelphia in the 1790s with the Federal Government, supposedly permanently settling certain territorial boundaries and establishing an annual payment that the United States of America was supposed to pay to them at certain specific places in the Northwest Territories, including Fort Wayne and Detroit. Well, guess what, the US Government was not actually paying those promised annuities and White settlers were continuing to push into areas of what are now called Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. The Native Americans were trying to become peaceful farmers, they said, often with the advice and help of Pennsylvania’s Quakers, which they appreciated, but they objected greatly to other White traders who introduced whiskey into their communities, which they called a poison, as alcoholism became widespread among them.

The situation was threatening to break into open warfare, as it had done before in History. To avoid that, in late 1801 a delegation of allied chiefs made a journey to Washington DC, by now the new federal capital, to officially register their complaints with President Thomas Jefferson. But at that time there was no direct route over the Allegheny Mountains to Washington from the Ohio River valley, so the Native Americans traveled up the river to Pittsburgh, and then made the journey overland down the national road that had been built between Western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and then down to DC. They met with Thomas Jefferson and formally delivered their complaints, which had been translated into English by an interpreter named William Wells: “Father, when our white brothers came to this land, our forefathers were numerous and happy; but since their intercourse with the white people, and owing the introduction of the fatal poison, we have become less numerous and happy.”

Now, that's just an excerpt of a larger dignified, detailed and heartrending document of protest that was delivered to Jefferson and printed in newspapers in early January of 1802. Afterwards, the delegation needed to make its way home to the Ohio Valley, probably mostly on foot, but utilizing wagons and boats where they could hire them. Travel in the middle of winter was difficult. And it took them a while, but by late February they were back in Philadelphia, and they needed funds to help them make the long trek across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh where they could once again reach the Ohio River.

Somebody evidently suggested to the Native Americans that if they needed money, perhaps they could put on a show! Maybe exhibit some of their tribal dances and ceremonies, which they were aware a lot of people were interested in seeing the dances of the Delaware and the Shawnee Indians, as White people usually referred to these particular tribes. Sell tickets! Some of the chiefs evidently even went to the New Theatre on Chestnut Street and witnessed for themselves that the White plays and operas presented there typically included a section of dance or ballet, often done in a folk style - indeed sometimes supposedly representing “Indian” dances. Well, we can do better than that, they no doubt thought . . So, they put on a show, wearing whatever tribal ceremonial regalia they had brought with them. And it evidently went so well they did it twice, in fact.

On Saturday March 6, 1802, a notice appeared in the newspaper The Federal Gazette. “NEW-THEATRE”, it read, “Monday evening, March 8, Will be presented (for the last time this season) a Historical Drama, in five acts, called Deaf and Dumb, or The Orphan Protected.” At the end of play, the notice continued: “for the second and last time, by desire The Shawanese and Delaware Chiefs now in this City, will dance several of their country dances, particularly, the CORN PIECE, the WAR DANCE, etc. The principal Chief will speak an address.” Now, presumably this chief, who is not named, would deliver a version of the protest he had just made in Washington.

So how did this evening go? Well in the memoirs of the actor and theatrical manager William Wood, whom we know was in the cast of the play Deaf and Dumb, (this was a new English drama about a deaf French nobleman who proves his intelligence to his family by learning sign language) we find the following account of the Indian dance performance: 

These dancers were (as was said of them) so terribly in earnest, that in their furor piece after piece of their scanty drapery became so unfixed and disarranged, as to occasion the flight of several ladies from the boxes. A villainous punster, hearing some doubts expressed whether these were real Indians, declared it his conviction, at least as far as the show knees (Shawnees) were concerned.

What Wood was relating, in that discreet Victorian way, was that the dances of the Native Americans had been quite a sensation on the stage, but that it became a bit of a local scandal when, well, what we nowadays might call a ‘costume malfunction’ occurred, and some of the men’s loincloths revealed rather more of their legs and other personal anatomy than the Philadelphia ladies in the audience were comfortable being close to, and so they had fled the box seats near the stage.

That must have been quite an evening at the theater - almost unimaginable today, because the evening was then rounded off by an amateur performance by a Frenchman, a White refugee from the revolution in Haiti, who proceeded to put on a blackface pantomime  called Obi, or Three-Fingered Jack, which depicted a famous slave rebellion in Jamaica! Wow, well, yeah, that was the state of race portrayal on the stage in the early 19th Century, a crazy mixture of both startling authenticity - and then outright racist cultural appropriation. But Wood tells us that this show was quite popular and years later could remember that the ticket sales that evening “brought large receipts to the treasury.” The Native American chiefs evidently collected enough to make their journey home to Ohio and Indiana, anyway. But here’s the thing, the bit about the er, costume malfunction was evidently the one piece of popular lore that remained behind in Philadelphia, more than anything. Stick around and we’ll see why.

Now was this the story that Krimmel was depicting in his painting? Did he hear about this incident, which happened before his arrival? The title of the painting clearly says 1812, not 1802. But look at the painting itself, what exactly is being shown here? Again, please, take a look at it on the website, if you can. There is a roomful of about thirty people, all Native American, evenly divided between males and females, though the males mostly stand in the foreground, while the women are arranged in the back and sides.

The room, we immediately see, is not an early 19th Century stage. Not at all. The walls are lined with lashed logs overlaying a square trellis and a bearskin hangs with claws extending down - a generalized but not wholly inaccurate rendition, from what I can gather, of the interior of a North American Indian ‘earth lodge’ typical of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. So this is definitely not the interior of either the New Theater on Chestnut Street or the Olympic Theatre on Walnut Street, nor does it seem like a representation of any standard painted scenery likely to be in the collection of either institution. There is a small raised platform at one end of the room, a sort of miniature stage, to be sure, but a couple of sleeping dogs lie beneath it which seems unlikely stage decoration for a crowded theater. This can’t be a representation, in fact, of an actual performance or ceremony at all. The figures are not even really in vigorous motion. It can’t be a dance. Most of them are in very relaxed or casual poses.

So what is happening, then? There are two male figures that are at the center of the focus. One, with a tall feathered headdress, a necklace, a blanket, loincloth and leggings, stands just left of center, clearly a chief or authority figure. He is looking to his right with a stern expression, sharing his gaze with a group of half a dozen or so other men who are all either scowling or bemusedly smiling.

The chief gestures to his left pointing at the other main figure, a shaved-head man who is standing somewhat isolated on the little stage, wearing only a light blue loincloth or kilt. His hands are raised, elbows at right angles, in a gesture of apprehension. Another man sitting nearby puts his hands to his face. Four men in the foreground are seated or lying in attitudes that if you look carefully (and The Met is absolutely right about this) are Krimmel’s frank tributes to figures of Native Americans in well-known paintings by Benjamin West such as The Death of General Wolfe or William Penn Signing a Treaty with the Indians. The well-muscled man at the lower front is lying with his back to the viewer not unlike Velasquez’ “Rokeby Venus.'' Actually, he’s more than a little sexy. 

There’s more than a bit of sexual tinge in the air. Everybody else seems a bit embarrassed. The women in the background are whispering in each other’s ears. Then you notice, where the chief is pointing - directly at the crotch of the man in the blue loincloth. 

Suddenly it all becomes clear. This is Krimmel's representation, not of the ceremony, not of a dance, but of the moment after the dancer’s “scanty drapery became unfixed and disarranged,” as William Wood put it, and everyone got a clear view. He’s embarrassed, and everyone else is either laughing, shocked, or amazed. (It’s a bit like those postcards you can get in England, about Scotsmen dancing in their kilts. What do they wear underneath? Well we all just found out, laddie!) This is a representation not of what actually happened among a group of Native American diplomats as they danced a ceremonial dance to raise money for a journey home - it's really, by proxy, about the shock, titillation, amusement and embarrassment of the white spectators. A bit of a rather silly and smutty joke, really. This seems to have escaped the knowledge of the curators at the Met, where this watercolor currently resides, but I bring it to their attention, for whatever it’s worth. Once you know the context, it all becomes clear.

All right . . .  so, that’s what that is. But again, you say, that happened in 1802 and it happened in the Chestnut, not the Walnut or Olympic Theatre, why the label on this painting?

Well - here he comes . . . .this has to do with Pavel Petrovich Svinyin, and yet ANOTHER delegation of Native Americans who came to Philadelphia.

Svinyin was a Russian diplomat, a traveler, a writer and an artist in the years 1811-1813  was stationed in Philadelphia at the Russian consulate. Like Krimmel, he was a European who delighted at what was to his eyes the exotic diversity of American people. He spent a lot of his time in America writing a book that would explain Russia to Americans. And then, when he went back to St. Petersburg he wrote a book to explain America to the Russians.  In the book he published after he got home, which was called A Picturesque Voyage Through North America, contained dozens of sketches and watercolors of Americans that he supposedly made himself, and he told many stories about his travels. 

Most interesting to us is that he claimed he had attended, at the Olympic Theater in Philadelphia an exhibition of dances by native Americans for which they had been paid 100 dollars: “The gathering of people was most numerous and the theater was lit extremely brightly. At 7 pm the curtain was raised, and we saw a group of savages, with women and children, in several positions.” 

He then goes on for pages and pages about the details of each of the dances, and goes off on long tangents about other things he has learned about Indians, all of which seem wildly improbable and many of which frankly are insulting. Now Svinyin, by reputation, was a terrible and compulsive liar, so generally nobody takes these stories in this book very seriously. He’s sometimes called the “Russian Barnon von Munchausen '' - he evidently probably didn't even make the drawings of America that he published in his book - he bought them from Krimmel in Philadelphia, and then passed them off as his own work.

In the 20th Century an American scholar visiting Russia found a folder containing the original watercolors and brought them back to New York, which is why now they are in The Met. For a while people believed that both the Oyster Seller and the Indian Ceremony were Pavel Svinyin’s work. Indeed you can still see them labeled that way in books. Fairly recently all these works have been attributed to Krimmel, instead. Svinyin was a big fat liar, has been proven over and over again. Skepticism about his veracity, remember, has led The Met in the caption of this picture to say that the event never happened and neither he nor Krimmel ever saw such a thing. Even the historians Swoboda and Whisenhunt, who in 2008 published an amazing book called A Russian Paints America, the Travels of Pavel P. Svinyin, say about this account:

“This is the most controversial chapter in Svinyin’s book. The accuracy of his information, as well as the entire story of his meeting with natives in Philadelphia under the circumstances described, appears to have been drawn from his literary imagination and not actual facts.”

But I’m here, the Philadelphia theater history podcast guy, to tell you they did.

How do I know this? OK, in the summer of 1812, as the War with Great Britain was getting underway, and many Native American tribes in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan had joined in the fighting on the side of the British, another group of tribal leaders from the Mississippi River Valley: Osages, Siouxs, Sac and Fox, Ioways, came to Washington DC to meet with President James Madison to confer with him about their concerns and needs. This is documented. Once again, they traveled up the Ohio River, went east across Pennsylvania, turned south at Philadelphia, and then when they had met the President in Washington, on their way back, like their predecessors ten years before, they needed to raise funds to start their long journey back to the Mississippi River.

So somebody in Philadelphia, remembering the LAST time an Indian delegation came through town, suggested that they also put on the show - and this time not at the New Theater, but at the empty and capacious Olympic Theater on Walnut and 9th Street, which had been built just a few years before for equestrian circus performances in 1809, but that had just been expanded to include an actual stage. During the summer, the circus/theater company was away, touring. And with the tensions of war rising, its owners were eager for business. So, a night of Dancing Native Americans - sure why not, after all there was precedent!

Here is my evidence: it was in the newspaper. For One Night only, the notice in Poulsons Advertiser read: “The public are respectfully informed . . . that 36 Indian Chiefs and Warriors now on their way from Washington, in some of their principal War Dances, War Ceremonies and Dances of Peace.  . . they will appear magnificently equipped in the War Dresses, with arms and ornaments peculiar to each nation. . .”  And then, the actual names of the performers were listed: Tatonga Mane, The Buffalo That Walks, The Prince, Tall Soldier, Without Ears, The Little Wind, Blue Wind, Black Thunder, Black Crow, The Elk.   

“The performances will commence with the Ring Dance, Pipe Dance, or Dance of Peace, the Buffalo Dance, The Dog Dance, the Discovery, or Spy Dance. . . Performance to begin at 7 o'clock.”

All of this corresponds pretty exactly to Svinyin’s account of the evening. For a congenital liar, (whose name, by the way means PIG in Russian, so I must say the Native American Names come off sounding rather better than his.) Syinyin seems to have gotten this program, as listed in the newspaper, correctly. He even recalled vivid details of their dances that ring true, to me:

“They created two circles, one made up of men, the other of women. The first circle began to move clockwise, and the other in the opposite direction, smoothly, barely moving their feet. At each step the men hit themselves on the shoulders with the palms of their hands, emitting wild and loud exclamations. The women answered by clapping their hands and [by] screaming shrilly, which created a harmony rather ‘delicate’ for our ears. However, everything looked surprisingly precise in its measures; afterwards, the fast dances were accompanied by the sounds of drums and whistles. Truly, the dances were rather curious, because each participant was imitating some kind of animal; . . . Generally, the Indians dance in a position that we call v prisiadku [squat dance], using all of their limbs and muscles.”

What Svinyin doesn’t mention is any “costume malfunctions” - and that doesn’t really seem like a detail he would leave out, honestly. So maybe the Osage and Sioux were more careful with their dances, or their ceremonial clothes were of a type less likely to come undone. 

But the performance did happen. And although we can doubt Svinyin in many things, I think he was there. And if Svinyin was there, why not Krimmel, too? 

Let me speculate for a minute. Maybe, just maybe, the two Europeans, “the Hogarth of America” and “the Munchausen of Russia'', met in the lobby of the Walnut street  theater. After the show they walk out together into the night. They spy an oyster-seller with a wheelbarrow of oysters, across the street, and stroll over to get some. As the oyster vendor expertly opens the shells with his knife, the two young men converse about the amazing spectacle they’ve just witnessed - exactly the sort of thing they’d come to America to see! 

“Hey, I've already done a watercolor of some other Indians dancing at a theater in Philadelphia a while back,” says Krimmel to Svinyin. “Well, I would love to see your work,” says Svinyin. Krimmel says: “I put in all sorts of funny references - there’s a hilarious story attached to it, too.” He tells both Svinyin and the oyster man the old story about The Loose Loincloth, and they all laugh. “Excellent!” says Svinyin ``I buy it from you!” And they all laugh some more. It’s a great joke. Krimmel just doesn’t know the joke is on him.

A lone woman approaches the group. She picks up the candle from the cart and holds it up so they can all see her face. The two young men gaze at her, and she smiles back.

Eventually Krimmel’s painting of the Indian ceremony, along with many others, goes into Svinyin’s book, and scholars laugh and say hey that never happened in Philadelphia - that big old liar. It must have been some other place.

But now you and I know that it did, if you know what you’re looking at, and where to look for it. All sorts of things happen in Philadelphia theaters. It’s that kinda town.

Thanks for coming along, on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.