CategoriesStyles and Movements
Ashcan School
New York realist painters of the early 1900s who recorded crowded streets, tenements, bars and boxing rings with dark, vigorous brushwork.
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About
Several of these painters began as newspaper illustrators in Philadelphia in the 1890s, sketching fires, crimes and street scenes on deadline. John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn gathered around Robert Henri, who urged them to paint modern life quickly and directly, and all later moved to New York.
Their subjects were the city's working and immigrant neighbourhoods: rooftops, backyards, ferries, saloons, theatres and children at play. They used a dark palette and slashing strokes learned from Frans Hals, Diego Velázquez and Édouard Manet. Sloan's McSorley's Bar (1912) and George Bellows's Cliff Dwellers (1913) show the range. In 1908 Henri and his allies exhibited with three other painters as the Eight, a protest against the conservative juries of the National Academy of Design. The Ashcan label came later and stuck, though beside the European modernism of the 1913 Armory Show their realism already looked conservative.
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