Snapshots of the Past

The Mash Note to the Ballets Girls – Vintage Print

The Mash Note to the Ballets Girls — historic photograph
The Mash Note to the Ballets Girls. Historic photograph from the Historic Print Archive collection.

(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

This historic photograph of The Mash Note to the Ballets Girls brings a moment of history to your wall. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.

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The Mash Note to the Ballets Girls

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The title points to a comic scene built around a mash note, the lovestruck letter a theater admirer might pass to a dancer, here addressed to the "ballet girls" of the stage. Copyright is credited to William H. Rau, a Philadelphia photographer who worked widely in the period's commercial and illustrative photography. Around 1900, stage-door admirers and chorus lines were a staple of popular theater, and jokes about smitten suitors and the women they pursued ran through burlesque and vaudeville. The catalog tags this as humor and theatrical glamour, so the picture is best read as a period joke about stage romance rather than a record of a specific event. The catalog details are unverified, so the exact staging and original context are worth checking against other sources.

Medium1 photographic print.
Notesc1901.
SubjectsCopyright by William H. Rau. This record contains unverified, old data from caption card. Caption card tracings: Humor; Glamour--Photos; Theater--Burlesque; Dance--Ballet; Shelf.
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,045 × 1,536 px · prints to 3 × 5 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-136370

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