Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum realia, 1700-1966

This collection contains 391 puppets, 128 masks, and 30 stage models.

This collection now contains 391 objects; mostly puppets, including marionettes, hand puppets, rod puppets, pantins, and shadow puppets, but also a number of figurines, dolls and dioramas, and three textiles. It appears that non-puppet three-dimensional objects were included in the puppet series before 1971. The puppets were assigned identification numbers during a cataloging project in the 1960s. All puppet identification numbers higher than P69 were assigned in 2009.

The earliest acquisitions were gifts of Brander Matthews. The most recent acquisitions, and also the collection's newest items, are three beggar figurines made by Russian émigrés living in Iran during WWII. They were the gift of Majorie Windust Halper in 1989.

What began as a collection of English, French and Italian puppets gradually became a collection of considerable breadth, with puppets from Burma, China, India, the United States, Thailand, Turkey, Java, Japan, and Mexico, among other countries. The oldest puppets are two 18th century French marionettes of Joseph and one of the Magi. Highlights of the collection include two eight-foot tall puppets designed by Robert Edmond Jones and constructed by American theatre pioneer Remo Bufano for the Metropolitan Opera's 1931 production of Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex".

This collection now contains 128 masks, mask molds, wigs, and plaster mask reproductions. The oldest mask in the collection is an 18th century Javanese dance mask. A gift from Prof. and Mrs. Samuel and Natasha Shterenzon Eilenberg in 1963, the mask is also the most recent acquisition. The newest masks in the collection were made in 1955 for an American production of Lysistrata. The collection includes items from Japan, Italy, Java, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, India, and the United States. It is particularly abundant in Japanese, Mexican, and American masks.

This collection contains 30 models, both models of historic theatres and set designs for specific productions. The models were acquired between 1911 and the 1960s. The set designs were largely the gifts of the various people involved with productions, from set designers to producers, and were acquired fairly consistently throughout the museum's existence. The theatre models, on the other hand, were either gifts of Brander Matthews and other Dramatic Museum patrons or directly commissioned by the Museum, and were planned to display the full history of the theater when taken together. Global breadth appears to have been the goal of the BMDM's curators, who were desirous of adding a Spanish theatre model to the collection.

A broad rather than deep collection, it nevertheless has concentrations of French, English, American, and Japanese models. The earliest model, depicting a production of Leah Kleschna at the Manhattan Theatre in New York, was built in 1904. The latest models, both set designs, were built in 1966 for Japanese productions.

The several Joseph Urban set models which the BMDM had collected to illustrate various parts of that influential man's career were added to the over 300 set models in the Joseph Urban Papers when his widow presented them to the Museum in 1955, and are described in the Urban finding aid.

The numbering is that used in Donald Pace's "Catalogue of the Brander Matthews Collection of Theatre Models" (New York: Barnard College, 1973).