In depicting human dramas he glimpsed around him, as in "Three A.M.,” 1909, Sloan captured not only the nocturnal activities of the lusty, independent women of the city but their tenement surroundings. This iconic painting is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
:Early in the Twentieth Century, while American Impressionists continued to record tranquil cityscapes and pastoral vistas and genteel leisure-class activities on canvases filled with color and light, artists of the Ashcan School turned their attention — and dark palettes — to the face of urban life. Heeding the call of their charismatic leader, Robert Henri, this group of talented, rebellious painters depicted the realities of the world around them, principally New York City.
One of the best of the new realists was John Sloan (1871–1951), who made his way from rural Pennsylvania to Philadelphia to Manhattan, where his images of streets, squares, gathering places and city dwellers helped define New York City in the public imagination.
A man of the people and dedicated Socialist, Sloan moved through the vast and rapidly changing metropolis on foot, creating a "pedestrian aesthetic" that captured the rhythms of urban living in intimate images. Particularly as a newcomer to the city, he found compelling human dramas all around him.
"Seeing the City: Sloan's New York" is on view at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art through April 27. Originally organized by the Delaware Art Museum, where the show opened last fall, the exhibition is curated by the Delaware Museum's Joyce K. Schiller and associate curator Heather Campbell Coyle. Comprising 115 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, the exhibition offers an in-depth view of the artist's years in New York and the city's effect on his art.
"The Wake of the Ferry No. 2,” 1907, is perhaps Sloan's most famous painting. Art historian Oliver W. Larkin once called it "a masterful design with few elements: the post of the boat, the barrier at its stern, a corner of the upper deck, a lone passenger and the oily harbor water swelling under a thick sky.” The Phillips Collection.
Born in Lock Haven, Penn., and raised in Philadelphia, Sloan studied with Thomas Anshutz and Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked as an artist-reporter for
The Inquirer
and
The Press
from 1892 to 1903. His job required on-the-spot sketches of fires, accidents and events around the city, which were then turned into newspaper illustrations. He became an expert etcher and also created austere paintings of everyday life around Philadelphia.
Those paintings reflected the painterly styles of artists favored by his mentor, Henri, such as Rembrandt, Hals, Velzquez, Manet and Whistler. Thus, Sloan and other Henri disciples turned not to the broken brushwork, high-keyed palette and bright light of the Impressionists, but to strong paint application and the richer tonalities of the older masters.
Sloan benefited from association with fellow newspaper illustrators William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn, who joined in meetings at Henri's studio, where activities ranged from discussions about art to masquerades to boxing matches.
Following Henri and other illustrator friends to New York in 1904, Sloan and his mercurial wife, Dolly, settled in Chelsea and he found employment as an illustrator for
Century, Collier's Weekly
and
Leslie's Monthly
. Believing that knowledge of life was best acquired by spending time with ordinary people, Sloan indefatigably searched for subjects out his windows and on city streets.
