Lee Lash: Vaudeville Scenic Painter

Item from New York Clipper, April 1913

We have Kevin Fitzpatrick, Shepherd of The Lambs to thank for the present post, for he pointed me in the direction of painter Lee Lash (1864-1935). Lash had studied in Paris to be a proper fine art painter. If you google his name, you will find several of his works being promoted by auction houses, many of them depicting urban New York subjects like Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Empire State Building. But starting in 1893 he found a more reliable way to pay the bills. He started a business that painted advertising curtains for vaudeville.

I have LONG been fascinated by this idea. I didn’t put more about it in my book No Applause, because I had few details, and acquiring more would have required a prohibitive amount of research for what was essentially an interesting digression. Basically, back in the day, many theatres sold advertising on the curtains, same as they do in programs, and the same as sports franchises do at their stadiums. Here’s an example of one of them (though not by Lash) taken from the website of Dr. Wendy Waszut-Barrett of Historic Stage Services in Minneapolis:

My early awareness of ad curtains came from a couple of places. Fred Allen had created a parody of one of these curtains for a Broadway revue he starred in. And you can see one depicted in the 1930 movie short The Happy Hottentots, one of the best films ever at depicting the experience of the front line vaudevillian.

When I founded my theatre company Mountebanks three decades ago one of my hopes was to explore reviving this idea as a revenue stream, but I never found myself in a position where I could sell the concept — at my level of producing, it would cost more to execute than it could earn in income.

Anyway, Lash had excellent timing. He launched his business just as the major vaudeville circuits were being founded. Originally based in San Francisco, he moved to New York within two years and essentially cornered the market. The Lee Lash Studios (not to be confused with Lee’s Lash Studios) were located in nearby Mount Vernon, with sales offices in Times Square. All the big producers employed them. Fitzpatrick quotes Joe Laurie as saying ““It ain’t real vaudeville if it ain’t got a Lee Lash drop with plenty of neighborhood ads on it…”

I couldn’t find any examples of Lash’s advertising curtains online, but here’s a drop he designed for Major Bowes’ birthday party at the Capitol Theatre (from Lee Lash Collection at NYPL):

Apparently, in later years, the Lash Studios even got involved in producing.

Lee’s brother and business partner George Lash was a Lamb; more on him and the studio are in Kevin Fitzpatrick’s article here.

And with gratitude we direct you to the research of Dr. Wendy Waszut-Barrett, which tells far more.

And for more about vaudeville historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.