AFA Winter 2017

plain piece of work; shows no facility or brilliance. The work of a plodder.”  2 In the painting (Fig. 1), a serious young man in a dark coat and tie emerges from the dark background: his pose is resolutely frontal and his expression is bland. The most memorable element may be his gold-framed eyeglasses. And though the artist’s mature assessment may be unduly harsh, “earnest” does seem the ideal descriptor for the small canvas and its young maker. Sloan left Central High School early to help support his family and soon found work as a newspaper illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer , and later, the Philadelphia Press . He took classes at the Spring Garden Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and developed friendships with the young artists and illustrators of the city, who often gathered in Robert Henri’s studio at 806 Walnut Street. Henri encouraged the assembled group—which sometimes included fellow newspaper illustrators Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—to begin painting seriously and to see themselves as artists. Henri encouraged these emerging artists to paint the world around them, and by the late 1890s, Sloan was heeding his friend’s advice. Sloan painted Philadelphia from Walnut Street to the Schuylkill in canvasses that focus on architecture and atmosphere (Fig. 2). His portraits generally depict individuals in the artist’s immediate circle; one of Sloan’s finest early paintings, Violinist, Will Bradner (1903, Fig. 3), portrays a friend who was the first violinist of the Philadelphia Symphony Society. In city scenes and portraits, Sloan employed a dark and muted palette brightened only by flesh tones, highlights of white and yellow, and dabs of orange and red. His color choices reflect the direct inf luence of Henri and their shared admiration for historical and modern masters, including Frans Ha ls, Diego Velá zquez, Édouard Manet, and J. A. M. Whistler. In 1904 Sloan and his wife Dolly relocated to New York, where Sloan supported himself as a freelance illustrator for books and magazines, while he explored his new city and built his career as an exhibiting artist. They settled near Madison Square, in a neighborhood that offered rich subjects for etchings and paintings like Throbbing Fountain, Night (1908, Fig. 4). A few years after his move, Sloan was exhibiting his portraits and city pictures in Winter 98 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com this page top Fig. 2: John Sloan (1871–1951), Schuylkill River, 1900-1902. Oil on canvas, 24 × 32 inches. Delaware Art Museum; Gift of the John Sloan Trust, 2006. © 2017 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. this page bottom Fig. 3: John Sloan (1871–1951), Violinist, Will Bradner, 1903, Oil on canvas, 37 × 37 inches. Delaware Art Museum; Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970. © 2017 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.