Black fish costume - Public domain zoological illustration

Large collection of erotic art

Will R. Barnes designed costumes for numerous Broadway productions between 1898 and 1924. Born in Australia, he came to the U.S. in the late 1890s and began designing costumes for a number of Joe Weber and Lew Fields’s Music Hall shows. Later he worked with the designers Cora MacGeachy and William Henry Mathews on the Hippodrome spectacles until the final show there in 1922. Barnes specialized in costumes for the lighthearted musical entertainment that was extremely popular at the time: musical comedies, operettas, revues, vaudeville productions and burlesques. The best known of these productions today is probably Naughty Marietta, which was scored by Victor Herbert. Art historian Stefanie Munsing Winkelbauer notes that Barnes’s designs show a predilection for striking contrasts and bold pattern. The National Library of Australia and the New York Public Library have large collections of his costume designs. Barnes also was known for his watercolor landscapes.