"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the second of three 12-piece Exhibitions of works by Robert Henri (1865-1929), a realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of art. 

Born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati in 1865, he changed his name after his father was indicted for manslaughter in 1882. In 1883, the family moved to New York City, then to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the young artist completed his first paintings

 

Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, Thomas Hovenden, and James B. Kelly. Two years later he moved to Paris  to study under Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury at the Académie Julian. Influenced by the French Impressionists (especially Edouard Manet), he began to develop the signature style of urban realism for which he would become known. In 1891, Henri enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied for a year before moving back to Philadelphia and resuming his studies at the

Pennsylvania Academy. At the end of 1891, he returned to Philadelphia, studying under Robert Vonnoh at the Pennsylvania Academy. Henri also began a 3-year stint as an art teacher at the School of Design for Women.

 

At the end of the 19th century Henri came to know several of the other painter/illustrators that became known as the "Philadelphia Four": John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn. Their gatherings featured readings and discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emile Zola, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris Hunt and George Moore. By 1895 Henri had begun replacing his classic Impressionist influences with a style of realism that he felt better reflected his own time and experiences.

In 1900 Henri moved to New York, where he taught at the the New York School of Art from 1902 to 1908. His students included Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Norman Raeben, Louis D. Fancher and Stuart Davis. 

Henri was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1906, while teaching art in Spain.

 

After the academy refused to exhibit works by Henri and his artist friends in its 1907 annual show, he organized the first show by the group which would become known as “The Eight.” The group’s Exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in February 1908 symbolized a rejection of the art establishment’s traditional strictures and heralded the beginning of artistic freedom for The Eight.

In 1910, with the help of John Sloan and Walt Kuhn, Henri organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists, the first nonjuried, no-prize show in the U.S., which he modeled after the Salon des Indépendants in France. Works were hung alphabetically to emphasize an egalitarian philosophy. The exhibition was very well-attended but resulted in few sales

 

Henri would go on to teach at the Art Students League from 1915 until 1927. He died in 1929 at the age of sixty-four. Henri was buried at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island.

In the spring of 1929, Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York. He was eulogized by colleagues and former students and was honored with a memorial exhibition of seventy-eight paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Forbes Watson, editor of The Arts magazine wrote, "Henri, quite aside from his extraordinary personal charm, was an epoch-making man in the development of American art."