Design for stage production. Mixed media with watercolor and gouache on board. 375x495 mm; 14 3/4x19 1/2 inches, sight size. Numbered and captioned "195 - R. - Shine Ladie's [sic] -" in lower left margin and with artist's stamp on verso, seen through window on frame verso. Matted and framed. Provenance: Jeffrey Thier Fine Arts, Buffalo, New York; private collection. Anthony Nellé was a ballet dancer trained at the Russian Imperial School of the Grand Opera. He danced in Poland, Russia and England, and joined ballerina Anna Pavlova's company, which brought him to the United States. By 1926, Nellé began work as a choreographer and he later became a production designer for theaters in Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, Hollywood, and Europe. His extraordinary art deco stage designs of the 1920s and 1930s were often compared to the costume designs of Erté. In the last decades of his life, he and his wife, Margaret Donaldson, opened a small dance studio in her hometown of Gowanda.
