"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the first of three 12-piece Exhibitions of works by William James Glackens (1870-1938), a realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of art.

 

William was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His older brother, Louis Glackens, was a cartoonist and illustrator. Throughout his school years, William  took a keen interest in drawing and drafting. After graduating from the prestigious Central High School in 1890, Glackens became an artist-reporter for The Philadelphia Record.  In 1892, he left that newspaper and began illustrating for the Philadelphia Press. He also enrolled in evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied under the well-known realist Thomas Anshutz. At the Academy, painter John Sloan introduced Glackens to Robert Henri, an influential figure in Philadelphia art circles. Thus began the Ashcan school of American art, a style which was based on the rejection of gentility and the embrace of working-class and middle-class metropolitan life.

 

Glackens traveled to Europe in 1895  with Henri  and other of his peers. He immersed himself in the European styles of art, beginning in Holland, where he studied the Dutch masters. After he and Henri rented a Paris studio for a year, he became heavily influenced by the Impressionists and

Post-Impressionists, especially Edouard Manet. Taken with the French painters  and painting style, Glackens would return to the south of France throughout his life.

 

After returning to the U.S. in 1896, Glackens became an artist for the New York World and eventually became a sketch artist for the New York Herald. Glackens also made a living as a magazine illustrator, before pursuing his real passion, which was painting. Exhibiting his work at the Allen Gallery In 1901, along with Henri and Sloan, he garnered his first recognition as a painter.

 

Glackens was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1906 as an Associate member,   becoming a full Academician in 1933.

 

Glackens became associated with a group of Ashcan painters known today as “The Eight”: Glackens, Henri, Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn,  Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast.  Glackens, Henri, Sloan, Luks, and Shinn were instrumental figures in the rising realist movement. Seeking creative freedom, they rebelled against the art establishment’s rigid definition of artistic beauty. 

 

Glackens’ works were often compared to Renoir, a comparison William found flattering. Commissioned by millionaire-inventor Albert C. Barnes, a classmate and friend from Central High School, Glackens went to Paris and purtchased 20 paintings by the likes of Renoir, Manet, and Matisse, a purchase which becasme the foundation of the Barnes Foundation Collection.

In 1916, Glackens served as the president of the newly-founded Society of Independent Artists. He continued to travel to France between 1925 and 1935 to study the work of the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists. His paintings received gold medals from annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1933 and again in 1936. 

 

Glackens died suddenly while vacationing in Westport, Connecticut on May 22, 1938.

 

Today, many of Glackens’ best paintings are found at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The largest collection of Glackens' art is to be found at the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale, where an entire wing is dedicated to his work; the museum holds approximately 500 Glackens paintings in its permanent collection.