"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the second of two 12-piece Exhibitions of works by John French Sloan (1871-1951), a realist painter, member of the group known as “The Eight” and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of art. 

 

Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Philadelphia. He and his two sisters were encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. In 1884 he enrolled at the Central High School in Philadelphia, where his classmates included William Glackens and Albert C. Barnes.

 

Sloan worked several jobs in draughtsmanship, etching, and commercial illustration, including a job in the art department of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1992 he attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied briefly under Thomas Anshutz. He also met the artist Robert Henri, who became his mentor and closest friend. With Henri’s encouragement, Sloan transitioned from graphic work to painting. In 1893, the two and Henri founded the Charcoal Club of Baltimore whose members would also include Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. Enamored of a new, original style of social realism,  the "Ashcan School" of American art was born.

 

Sloan married in 1901, providing the artist with a loyal-but-troubled partner who supported his art but was intemperate and volatile. During their time in New York from 1901-04, the couple became close friends with the artist John Butler Yeats, the elderly father of poet William Butler Yeats.

 

Sloan participated in the landmark 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in a group which included Philadelphia Charcoal Club members Henri, Glackens, Luks and Shinn as well as three artists who worked in a less realistic, more impressionistic style, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies. The group would become known as "The Eight." Rejecting the strictures of the traditional painting establishment, they bucked the conservative National Academy of Design by organizing their own touring exhibition of paintings, many of which featured the new style known as “social realism.”
 

While Sloan began to sell his paintings, he continued to rely on his earnings as a freelance artist for The Philadelphia Press, for which he continued to draw weekly puzzles until 1910. He also supplemented his income by selling work to publications such as Collier's Weekly, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner's.

 

In 1913, Sloan participated in the Armory Show, serving as a member of the organizing committee and exhibiting two paintings and five etchings. He spent the summers of 1914 and 1915 painting en plein landscapes in Gloucester, Massachusetts, inspired by the French Impressionists, including Van Gogh. The summer of 1918 would the last he spent in Gloucester.

 

In 1916 Sloan co-founded  the Society of Independent Artists. He would go on to teach at the Art Students League from 1914-1932.

 

After his first wife died in 1943, Sloan was remarried a year later to Helen Farra, a  former student forty years his junior with whom he had been romantically involved for a time in the 1930s. On September 7, 1951, John Sloan died of cancer while vacationing in Hanover, New Hampshire. 

 

Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century" and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of Socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs."