AFA Winter 2017

Winter 96 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com n February 3, 1908, an exhibition opened to great fanfare at Macbeth Galleries in New York. The day before the opening, the New York Herald trumpeted “Secession in Art,” and the World’s lengthy headline announced: “New York’s Art War and the Eight Rebels Who Dared to Paint Pictures of New York Life (instead of Europe) and are Holding Their Rebellious Exhibition All by Themselves.” In the coming weeks, the Philadelphia Press , the New York Times , American Art News , Current Literature , and The Craftsman covered the exhibition in detail. It was an impressive display of interest for an exhibition of paintings by artists who regularly exhibited in the city. Through their own promotional efforts, the painters—John Sloan, Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast—had become known as “The Eight” months before, though they were not an organized faction, and 1908 was the only occasion when they exhibited as a group. The artists varied in accomplishment, and painted diverse subjects in dissimilar styles. One reviewer compared the show to “the jangling and booming of eight differently tuned orchestras.”  1 What the painters shared was a sense of frustration with academic art and the institutions that served it, particularly the National Academy of Design in New York. The exhibition was intended to register their protest. This narrative of artistic rebellion, seized by the popular press and, later, by art historians, became a watershed in American art, uniting and defining this disparate set of artists. When the exhibition of The Eight opened, Sloan had been living in New York for less than four years and painting seriously for only about a decade. Born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Sloan was raised in Philadelphia. Although not from an affluent family, Sloan grew up in a house filled with books and prints, watercolors and oil paints, and parents who encouraged his creativity. Working from A Manual of Oil Painting by John Collier, Sloan taught himself the basics of oil painting when he was around nineteen years old. Late in life he recalled this early foray: “My first serious oil painting was a self-portrait . . . It is a very earnest, by Heather Campbell Coyle