Harvey Girls Stage Set painting: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

Oil painting on canvas by film director George Sidney, depicting a stage set from the motion picture The Harvey Girls. The painting shows a train on the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe line arriving at the station, with townspeople waiting to greet disembarking Harvey Girls, including actress Judy Garland, who will be employed as waitresses at the local whistle stop. Visible in the foreground are various elements of the stage set, evidence of a film in production, including a man with a megaphone on the second story porch to left and George Sidney smoking a pipe, standing on a camera boom to the left. The painting has a gray painted wood frame with deeply recessed composition molding in fruit and acanthus leaf motif, picture wire on back.

Directed by George Sidney, The Harvey Girls was a 1946 MGM historical musical that dramatized the real-life story of the eponymous hotel chain and its famous female waitresses. Based on the 1942 novel of the same name by Samuel Hopkins Adams the film was a critical and popular success and won an Academy Award for Best Original song in 1946 for "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", written by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer.

The Harvey Girls starred Judy Garland as Susan Bradley, a mail-order bride on a train headed to the town of Sandrock, New Mexico. When her plans get derailed, she turns to work at the newly opened Harvey House, modeled after the real-life Fred Harvey restaurant chain that sprouted along railway routes around the turn of the century. With the 1890s Western aesthetic as a backdrop, costume designers Irene Gibbons, Helen Rose, and Valles created stylized dresses for the Harvey House and antagonistic “Dance-Hall” Girls, contributing to a Hollywood mythologization of the American West and women’s role in “civilizing the frontier.”

Materials, dates and provenance

• Date made: 1946
• Object Name: painting
• Measurements: overall: 26 1/2 in x 38 1/4 in x 4 1/2 in; 67.31 cm x 97.155 cm x 11.43 cm
• Measurements: overall: 5 1/4 in x 38 in x 26 5/8 in; 13.335 cm x 96.52 cm x 67.6275 cm
• place made: United States: California, Culver City
• Subject: Motion Pictures
• Subject: Music
• ID Number: 2004.0166.01
• accession number: 2004.0166
• catalog number: 2004.0166.01
• Credit Line: Gift of Corinne Entratter Sidney
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.