"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 Everett Shinn (1876–1953) a realist painter, illustrator, designer, and playwright, member of the group known as “The Eight” and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of art.

 

Shinn was born in Woodstown, New Jersey to parents who were rural farmers. Everett’s ability to draw was evident from very early childhood. He enrolled at 15 at the Spring Garden Institute in Philadelphia where he studied industrial design and mechanical drawing.  In 1893 he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. By the age of 17 he was employed as a staff artist for the Philadelphia Press. It was during this period that he befriended William Glackens, George Luks and John French Sloan, who would all become members of “The Eight” and go to establish the Ashcan School, marked stylistically by a new genre of social and urban realism.

 

In 1897 he moved to New York to continue his career as a newspaper and magazine illustrator. He was married in 1898. The following year, he quit the newspaper business to work for the same magazine that employed his wife. Shinn became a successful illustrator, providing illustrations over the next two decades to assorted popular journals  including Harper's, Vanity Fair, Life and Look. He also began displaying his paintings publicly, which drew mixed reactions.

 

In 1900 Everett and his wife traveled to Europe, where Shinn became enamored of and influenced by the Impressionists, especially Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Louis Forain, whose theater scenes inspired his own works. Shinn’s works changed markedly after this, as he began to paint action scenes of various performers.

 

Back in Philadelphia, Shinn established the Charcoal Club along with Henri, Sloan, Glackens and Luks. This nucleus of painters—which eventually grew to 38 artists—became the foundation of the Ashcan School of art.

 

In February 1908, Shinn exhibited in the legendary exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York, a rebellion against the conservative tastes and restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful National Academy of Design. “The Eight” was born, comprised of the five realists plus Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast.

 

After divorcing in 1912 Shinn would remarry three more times, his personal romantic life becoming fodder for the tabloids. By the 1920s, the artist’s career was firmly established, although he suffered financial loss in the Great Depression like most people. He died of lung cancer in New York City in 1953 at age 76.

 

Shinn was recognized for his work and received numerous awards during the last 15 years of his life, although his lasting legacy would always be associated with the advent of the Ashcan School, whose artists believed that younger painters should look to the modern city for their subject matter and paint in a freer, less-academic style than the traditionalists who preceded them.