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Title	Cabinet Card photograph of Pauline Hall
Date	n.d.
Date era	1850-1900
Contributor	Newsboy
Artistic roles	Pauline Hall (Actor)
Genre	Burlesque
Theme	Women in 19th C. Theatre
Places	New York (N.Y.)
Item description	Cabinet Card photograph of Pauline Hall (1860-1919) in an unknown role. She is dressed in a burlesque costume and portraying a man. Card was produced by Newsboy in New York.
Object narrative	Cabinet card photograph of Pauline Hall (1860-1919) in an unknown role. Pauline Hall was born Pauline Fredericka Schmidgall in Cincinnati, OH on Feb. 26, 1860 and first stepped onto the stage as a dancer with a small singing part at an opera house in 1875. She began traveling with a follies company in 1878, but returned to comic and light opera by 1883. She opened with Ned Rice'; s company at the Bijou Opera House in New York, playing the role of Venus in Orpheus and Eurydice. This was a success for her, but not the first time she had been noticed by critics, as she had been mentioned for playing a role at the Metropolitan Opera House in The Mascot a year earlier. She continued to be a favorite in comic and light operas around the country until 1890, her most important role being Erminie in Erminie during 1886-1888. She performed Erminie eight hundred times while on Broadway and touring around the United States, making her a household name. She toured with her own companies from 1890-1896, and later entered vaudeville, reportedly earning as much as $600 a week by 1898. The role she is portraying here is of a man, as women playing male roles was a common practice in vaudeville and burlesque performances of that era, affording men the opportunity to view women'; s legs! Because of her statuesque appearance and womanly figure, she was often criticized for destroying the illusion of these roles, however. Hall traded on her womanly figure her entire career, maintaining it till the time of her death in 1919 while playing in Belasco'; s The Gold Diggers.
Original format	Portrait photo
Repository	Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries (http://library.uncg.edu/info/depts/scua/)
Collection	MSS255 Robert C. Hansen Performing Arts Collection
Series	10.1.1 Photographs, Cards, Caricatures/Satire and Other Pictoral Materials -- Photographs -- People
Finding aid link	http://library.uncg.edu/info/depts/scua/collections/manuscripts/ead/mss255.xml
Preferred citation	[Identification of item], Robert C. Hansen Performing Arts Collection, 1753-2006 (MSS255), Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives and Manuscripts, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, USA.
Copyright	http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/copyright
Object ID	MSS255_B88_003
Digital publisher	The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304
Digital collection homepage	http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/Hansen

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Cabinet Card photograph of Pauline Hall

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