Matthews Gallery

The ballet-pantomime, The Birthday of the Infanta, with music by John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), was well received at its world premiere in Chicago on December 23, 1919. Adolph Bolm, the ballet’s choreographer, provided Ruth Page with her first starring role in this production.

The basis for the ballet was a short story of Oscar Wilde, about a the dwarf who misunderstands the attention paid him by the royal Infanta. The story was inspired by the court of Philip IV of seventeenth-century Spain and the art of Diego Velázquez.