AFA Winter 2017

Winter 100 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Fig. 5: John Sloan (1871–1951), Spring Rain, 1912. Oil on canvas, 20¼ × 26¼ inches. Delaware Art Museum; Gift of John Sloan Memorial Foundation, 1986. © 2017 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. exhibitions around the nation, including the annual juried shows at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sloan was developing a reputation as a painter of New York subjects, a distinction that was cemented with the well-publicized exhibition of The Eight, where Sloan showed seven paintings of urban life. An inveterate walker, Sloan found inspiration all over Lower Manhattan. His painting Spring Rain (1912, Fig. 5) pictures a gray day in Union Square. In the same year he painted this canvas, Sloan relocated to Greenwich Village, joining the growing community of artists and intellectuals in that neighborhood. Summers took the painter further afield, and Sloan began plein air painting on visits to Bayonne and Coytesville, New Jersey (Fig. 6), and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. He outfitted a small sketch box for outdoor work and produced dozens of small landscapes each summer (Fig. 7). Painting outside brightened Sloan’s palette, but it was his adoption of the Maratta method that radically shifted his approach to color. In 1909 Sloan was introduced to the color system, diagrams, and premixed paints created by the artist Hardesty Maratta. When he painted Spring Rain , Sloan was working with Maratta’s system, which associated particular colors with specific musical notes and instructed painters to organize their palettes based on harmonious chords of color. The painting was based on a dominant seventh chord featuring blue-green, red- purple, orange, and yellow-green, hues that align with the notes G, B, D, and F. This structured approach to color was one of many color theories in vogue in the early twentieth century, and it attracted adherents among Sloan’s circle, including Robert Henri and George Bellows. Toward the end of 1912, Sloan wrote to art collector John Quinn that he had felt “the breeze of brighter color which is sweeping the fields of art.”  3 In February of 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, introduced the latest in