John Sloan (1871-1951)

Born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in 1871, Sloan revealed his budding talent as an illustrator when he created a hand-drawn edition of Treasure Island at the age of thirteen, an early exercise that foretold the first two decades of his career as a commercial artist. He clerked with a Philadelphia bookseller and print dealer while a senior in high school, a job that afforded him many hours to study illustrations among the volumes and to perfect his own drawing skills, and he also taught himself to etch. Sloan began creating greeting cards and calendars for A. Edward Newton, and in 1890 he took evening drawing classes at Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Institute, where the curricula focused on commercial art...

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His skills eventually led to a full-time position at the Philadelphia Inquirer by 1892, however, his hopes for developing into a fine artist continued to bubble beneath the surface. He experimented in oil painting when he could, initially learning the basic technique from a book, just as he had done with etching, and created his first self-portrait in oil in 1889. Three years later, while still employed at the newspaper, he enrolled in Thomas Anshutz’s drawing class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and, more consequently, was introduced to Robert Henri during a party at Charles Grafly’s studio. Henri became a mentor to Sloan, encouraging him and serving as sounding board as he experimented with his painting, and the two established a lifelong friendship lasting until the elder’s passing in 1929. 
A change in newspaper jobs in 1895 allowed Sloan to devote his mornings to easel work, which consisted of portraits and figure compositions rendered with a monochromatic palette reminiscent of Frans Hals and Diego Velazquez, a trait he acquired from Henri. In 1897, Henri returned from a stay in France, where he had painted Parisian streets scenes, and soon after he and Sloan both began finding subjects among Philadelphia’s squares and avenues. This symbiotic relationship continued when Henri moved to New York three years later, where his paintings of activity along the East River were echoed by Sloan’s depictions of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers back in Philadelphia. However, Sloan would eventually diverge from his mentor’s direct influence; while both were interested in the architecture of their environments and incorporated figures to denote scale, by 1901 Sloan had grown more concerned with a person’s relation to their environment, a key aspect of genre painting, which Henri had no interest in exploring. That same year, Sloan began exhibiting in group shows at the Allan Gallery in Philadelphia and was married to Anna M. Wall, affectionately known as “Dolly.” When Sloan lost his full-time newspaper job in late 1903, he and Dolly made the fateful decision to move to New York the following year, where he continued making ends meet through freelance commercial work while establishing himself in a new city. 
Sloan’s illustrations and portrait studies took up much of his time, but when able he enjoyed wandering among New York’s crowded parks and streets, bearing witness to the everyday events of urban life. He recorded his observances in diaries beginning around 1906 and translated them to his etchings and to his easel work, which he undertook in earnest despite not selling a single canvas; his first sale would not materialize until years later in 1913. While several of Sloan’s genre paintings were shown at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and other traditional venues, he joined Henri and others in their dissatisfaction with the rigid, academic strictures of the jury system and its rejection of subjects and styles beyond the conventional. In response, these eight painters organized an exhibition in 1908 at Macbeth Gallery, where each had free rein to hang what they wanted, without the approval of a committee or jury – a truly proletarian endeavor. While it garnered mixed reviews in the press, the show of the group dubbed “The Eight” was a clear success, welcoming hundreds of visitors over its brief two-week run and traveling to other cities. It also magnified Sloan’s name among the New York art crowd and two years later he helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists, which again featured several of “The Eight,” alongside younger artists who shared their affinity for pushing against the established exhibition hierarchies. All this activity ushered in a new approach to American modernism at a prophetic time. In February 1913, the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory, showcasing the innovative styles of both American and European artists, with the latter’s Cubist, Fauvist, and Post-Impressionist techniques creating a splash in conservative art circles. Sloan included two paintings and several etchings in the Armory Show, but more importantly took from viewing the exhibit an appreciation for expressive color: “After I saw the Van Goghs in the Armory Show, there was a more conscious planning of the palettes for undertones and top drawing colors that could be used like unblended graphic descriptive strokes as though made with pastels.”  He also acknowledged that his international counterparts were constantly painting and not waiting for a narrative subject worthy of their brush: “I saw that the European artists kept themselves going with any kind of subject, landscape or portrait or still life (in any style). This method produces more work, more ‘studies’; but it also leads to the discovery of new motivation. I made up my mind to save enough money to take a few months off to paint landscapes in Gloucester.” 
In July of 1914, John and Dolly Sloan arrived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, joining artists Charles and Alice Winter in renting a red cottage on East Main Street, near the entrance to Rocky Neck. With a renewed focus on landscape, Sloan arranged his easel wherever a view caught his attention and spent hours rendering Gloucester’s granite boulders, grassy fields, and brilliant waterfront using high-keyed color to emphasize form and space. Sloan produced sixty-four canvases during that first summer, an impressive number for three months’ output, and over subsequent summers he gradually incorporated different motifs, such as figures, which dominate his canvases from 1915, and the town’s bustling streets and charming architecture, which drew his focus in 1917. In addition to a wealth of paintable material, the summers spent at Gloucester provided valuable camaraderie, particularly amongst the environs of the rented home. The Red Cottage, as it came to be known, would later welcome painter Stuart Davis and his mother, sculptor Helen Stuart Davis, among other creative tenants, and serve as a hub for several others, including Paul Cornoyer, Agnes Richmond, Randall Davey, and Leon Kroll. When they were not painting, sketching, or exchanging ideas, the mostly New York-based group held informal recitals, had clambakes and played croquet on the lawn, and hosted parties for neighborhood children. Having no children of their own for personal reasons , Dolly and John were especially charmed by the younger denizens of Gloucester, with the artist including them in a number of canvases beginning in 1915. While many summer residents painted the waterfront activity of the fishing community, Sloan seems to have been more taken with Gloucester’s innate compositional features and, when including figures, with the simple enjoyments of day-to-day life.
The teens were an active time for Sloan: in early 1916, he was given his first one-man show at the New York studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and in the same year he began teaching full time at the Art Students League, which provided a much-needed source of regular income. He remained connected with the Art Students League over the next two decades, and also helped found the Society of Independent Artists, serving as president from 1918 until his passing in 1951. In 1917, New York’s Kraushaar Galleries hosted their first exhibition of his work, featuring etchings and his oils of New York and Gloucester, and established a lifelong association with the artist, despite his sporadic sales history. Gloucester remained a summertime retreat for Sloan, and he led small outdoor painting classes along its sandy beaches and rock-strewn coast, but he increasingly found much of it yielding to private development and that the artists’ colony had grown too popular: “There was an artist’s shadow beside every cow in Gloucester, and the cows themselves were dying from eating paint rags.”  The Sloans spent their last summer in Gloucester in 1918 and opted to head West the following year, joining Randall Davey in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 
Drawn to Santa Fe by Robert Henri’s description of its unique terrain and residents, Sloan would eventually purchase a home and return to the Southwest for nearly every summer through 1950. His genre paintings from these summers revealed his interest in Native ritual dances, but the region also provided an entirely different outlet for his landscape work: “I like to paint the landscape of the Southwest because of the fine geometrical formations and the handsome color. Study of the desert forms, so severe and clear in that atmosphere, helped me to work out principles of plastic design, the low relief concept. I like the colors out there.”  By 1927, Sloan also began devoting much of his energy to figure subjects and to nudes, a theme he had investigated earlier in his career, and tinkered with his ideas of ‘plastic design’ by adopting a new technique combining under-painting and translucent glazing to differentiate form and color. The resulting canvases were reminiscent of his earlier graphic pieces owing to his use of linework to define tangible planes and create texture, and revealed the influence of Renoir’s late-career work. 
As influential as Sloan was during his lifetime, sales of his paintings were sporadic; however, it did find its way into the collection of Duncan Phillips (and soon after his eponymous Washington, DC, museum) when Phillips purchased the artist’s early figural Clown Making Up in 1919. Two years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired his 1906 painting, Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, and during the Great Depression, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston took Sloan up on his offer to museums across the country to acquire half-price works when they purchased his 1910 canvas Pigeons for $2,000 in 1935. In the early 1940s, Sloan and others, namely Walter Pach, Howard Patterson, and Alphaeus Cole, linked up with businessman Max Pochapin and his Art Appreciation Movement, in hopes of bringing good art to the masses by offering reasonably priced paintings in department stores and similar settings across the country. Headquartered out of the Hall of Art in New York, Pochapin asked Sloan and Pach to help vet the work, an opportunity they welcomed, as it also allowed Sloan to consign earlier pieces, like Tittering Girls, Gloucester, which sold through the Hall of Art at some point during this affiliation, according to Rowland Elzea, author of the 1991 Sloan catalogue raisonné. Unfortunately, the venture which began on a positive note soon soured; Sloan and Pach grew disillusioned with the quality of pieces Pochapin was promoting and withdrew their support and the use of their names in early 1945. According to Elzea, forty of Sloan’s works were sold through the Hall of Art, but the artist was not told to whom pieces sold and there are evidently no archival records for the business. After forty-one years together, Dolly Sloan passed away in May of 1943. The following year, John Sloan, now seventy-three but still young at heart, married painter Helen Farr, a former student at the Art Students’ League who shared his art philosophy and whose notes in class helped form the 1939 publication of the Sloan’s Gist of Art. Seven happy years followed until John’s passing in 1951 in Hanover, New Hampshire, after complications from surgery. His artistic legacy was preserved by his widow Helen, and in 1978 she donated a treasure trove of artwork and archival materials to the Delaware Art Museum, where they continue to celebrate the vital role Sloan played in the advancement of American art.