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![\"john](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/john-sloan-self-portait.jpg\")
Self-Portrait by John Sloan, 1890. Source: Delaware Art Museum<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Initially a commercial artist and an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, John Sloan became part of the Ashcan School and one of New York\u2019s greatest painters. He was fascinated by the city\u2019s hustle and bustle, the alluring vignettes of life found on every city street. He painted prostitutes, drunks, street urchins, laborers, and European immigrants, all with an evenhanded and realistic touch. He didn\u2019t sentimentalize urban poverty or suffering but instead chose to faithfully and fairly render life and leisure in the city.<\/p>\n
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John Sloan Biography
\nSelf-Portrait by John Sloan, 1890. Source: Delaware Art Museum<\/p>\n
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Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in 1871 and moved to Philadelphia when he was only a few years old. He taught himself how to etch when he was a young man and then chose to attend drawing classes at the Spring Garden Institute. His first work was as a freelance commercial artist, joining the art department of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1892 and the Philadelphia Press in 1895. In the meantime, he was also one of the artists who formed the Charcoal Club, seeking to escape the confines, and tuition, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was inspired by Robert Henri, one of the most important art teachers of the day, and began painting portraits and the city of Philadelphia in the 1890s.<\/p>\n
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![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-schuylkill-river2.jpg\")
Schuylkill River by John Sloan, 1894. Source: Mutual Art<\/p>\n
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In 1904, Sloan and his wife, Dolly, whom he\u2019d married in 1901, moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined like-minded painters in \u201cThe Eight\u201d exhibition at Macbeth Gallery, which inaugurated the formation of the Ashcan School. He was also drawing for The Masses, a radical publication, and organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910. The Whitney Museum<\/a> notes that in New York, \u201che harnessed the skills he had learned from newspaper work\u2014the ability to memorize characteristic details and sketch quickly on the street\u2014to paint impressionistic images of squalid tenements, streets and storefronts, parks, restaurants, and bustling crowds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Sloan participated in the famous Armory Show of 1913 (contributing two oils and five etchings), taught at the Arts Student League, and was president of the Society of Independent Artists. His style was emphatically realistic; he once said, \u201cI am a realist\u2026I am more interested in the noble commonplace of nature than in the curious: believing that form and color are tools of the artist\u2019s imagination in re-creating life.\u201d Later in life, he began spending summers in New Mexico and admired Native American art and Mexican muralists. He died of cancer in 1951.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Ashcan Art \u00a0<\/p>\n The Ashcan School of Art<\/a> was so named because of its focus on the grittiness of urban life at the expense of moralizing content and aesthetic appeal. The term\u2019s originator was Art Young, who contributed to the socialist<\/a> publication The Masses along with many of the painters who would make up \u201cThe Eight\u201d (Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks, Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Everett Shinn; later Glenn Coleman and George Bellows<\/a> would be considered core parts of the School).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201cashcan\u201d moniker was not meant to be flattering. Young complained of Henri\u2019s followers in general that they \u201cwant to run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street\u2026For my part, I do not want to be connected with a publication that does not try to point out the way out of a sordid materialistic world.\u201d Young disliked the depiction of the homeless, prostitutes, orphans, and working men on their own terms, without heavy-handed sympathy. It seemed like the Ashcan artists were alright painting the world as it was, without trying to change it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t just the down-and-out that the Ashcan artists took for their subjects; rather, they were painting life in New York City<\/a> at the turn of the century with all its complexity, change, and opportunity. There were scenes in restaurants and bars; of immigrant women and street peddlers; of dancers, revelers, boxers, and circus performers; of people sitting on roofs and stoops; of children playing and swimming, women gossiping and working, and men smoking and drinking. The city itself was a character, as the skyscrapers<\/a>, subways, elevated railways, riverfront parks and piers, rooftops, and crowded avenues formed the backdrop for its denizens.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Sloan\u2019s own interpretation of New York City is brought to life in these six works of art.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 1. Election Night, 1907 \u00a0<\/p>\n The scene depicted here, which Sloan witnessed, is a public celebration in Herald Square where people gathered to find out the results of local, state, and federal elections<\/a>, which were projected on the side of the New York Herald building at Sixth and Broadway. The mood is raucous and exhilarating. People are throwing confetti, blowing tin horns, and tickling each other with \u201cticklers,\u201d one of which the woman in red at the center of the canvas is holding. Everyone is in motion, jostling against each other and laughing. Under the gleam of the streetlamps, windows of the El, and lights from the buildings, the scene is more like a New Year\u2019s Eve celebration than a political gathering.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Art historians Robert W. Snyder and Rebecca Zurier find this painting notable for its depiction of new uses of public spaces in the city. The subjects of the painting \u201cbreach all rules of correct decorum on city streets\u201d and, referencing an article in Harper\u2019s Weekly from 1908 that sniffed at the unseemliness of the behavior on Broadway on election night, said, \u201c[the painting] reveals another truth that most urban images concealed: in a city, especially during special moments of celebration, one can expect to be jostled and not mind it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2. Hairdresser\u2019s Window, 1907 \u00a0<\/p>\n Sloan painted this scene more or less as he actually saw it, explaining in his diary that he had been walking to Henri\u2019s studio and saw a woman in a window with bleached blonde hair, also bleaching the hair of her client as others on the street below watched. This scene exemplifies Sloan\u2019s comment that, \u201cIn between illustration jobs I roamed the streets, finding human incidents to etch and paint.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The scene features the hairdresser and client as Sloan wrote of them in the diary, totally oblivious to the curiosity they are engendering below, which is represented by a woman\u2019s rather aghast expression and the fixed stares of several men. The window is surrounded by signs and advertisements, but the hairdresser actually doing her work is the most effective advertisement of them all. Susan Fillin-Yeh has argued persuasively that Sloan\u2019s positionality in this painting makes little rational sense, as he is sort of hovering above the crowd; she notes that perspective, in general, is never really fixed or stable and that Sloan\u2019s \u201cslapdash and robust yet carefully observed constructions only appear to be uninflected scenes of daily life.\u201d Sloan is actually illuminating as much about the nature of painting as the nature of life in a modern metropolis.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3. Chinese Restaurant, 1909 \u00a0<\/p>\n Sloan believed that \u201cyou must\u2026paint the things that you know.\u201d For him, that was his city and its quotidian spaces, like restaurants. Chinese Restaurant derived from a memory he had of a restaurant in which a female patron had a red feather atop her hat; he wrote in his diary<\/a>, \u201cI saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant\u2019s fat cat. It would be a good thing to paint. I may make a go at it.\u201d He revisited the restaurant to refresh his memory, and it was \u201cjust in time, for tomorrow, they move to the corner below (29th St.).\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The scene features two sets of dining companions: the aforementioned woman with the red feather and a man in the foreground, and two men slightly behind them. The woman laughingly reaches forward to give the eager cat a bit of her food while her companion slurps his noodles from a porcelain bowl. A Chinese restaurant was not a typical subject of fine art, especially as the interior of this place is both dingy and rather lurid, but Sloan\u2019s embrace of \u201cwhat he knew\u201d made for a compelling image of how real New Yorkers lived (and ate).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 4. Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912 \u00a0<\/p>\n New York City skyscrapers rose to new vertical heights in the early 20th century, and along with them, the horizontal space of the rooftops became more important for urban dwellers. In 1929, the New York Times wrote of discovering \u201ca city above the city\u201d and how people no longer ignored their rooftops, that \u201c[the] varied uses of roofs in a crowded city pile up to an amazing total.\u201d On rooftops, apartment dwellers could string up their laundry, sleep under the stars to escape the stifling interior heat, sneak away for an amorous interlude, or, in Sloan\u2019s 1912 painting, gather with friends and dry their hair.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The three women in this painting are conversing amiably and drying their hair in the fresh air. Laundry hangs nearby, suggesting, along with the simple coarseness of their dress, that they will need to return to their work soon. Sloan called the women in this painting \u201chumble roof-top players\u201d and brought back scenes of three women on rooftops engaged in conversation in 1913\u2019s Roof Gossips and 1944\/50\u2019s Roof Chats. He also painted other rooftop scenes, which included subjects like raising pigeons, sunbathing, admiring the sunset, and stealing someone else\u2019s laundry.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 5. McSorley\u2019s Bar, 1912 \u00a0<\/p>\n McSorley\u2019s Old Ale House, established in 1854, is New York\u2019s oldest continually operated saloon. Initially only open to men (it would remain this way until 1970!), it was a watering hole par excellence. John McSorley, an immigrant from Ireland who arrived in New York in 1851, opened his bar at 15 East 7th Street and referred to it as \u201cThe Old House at Home.\u201d His son, William J. McSorley, took over its management in 1911 after his father\u2019s death. For a brief period of time, the bar sold hard alcohol but ultimately decided to stick with just ale. During Prohibition<\/a>, it sold \u201cnear beer\u201d and remained open.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n John Sloan painted the bar five times: \u201cI have never gone slumming to get subject matter. I was in McSorley\u2019s ale house about ten times in my life and painted five pictures of the place.\u201d This version, exhibited at the Armory Show but remaining unsold, shows five patrons engaged in conversation and imbibing pints of beer. The mood is relaxed and convivial, the setting homey and familiar with its eclectic array of tchotchkes and small paintings.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 6. Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928 \u00a0<\/p>\n As Sloan painted into the decade that would be known as \u201cThe Roaring Twenties<\/a>,\u201d his art seemed less ashcan and more jazz club. In this piece, Sloan pays equal attention to the built landscape\u2014the Elevated, Jefferson Market Courthouse in the background, storefront, and streetlamps\u2014as he does to the people enjoying it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n![\"Robert](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Robert-Henri-Night-Boardwalk.jpg\")
Night on the Boardwalk by Robert Henri, 1898. Source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston<\/p>\n
\n![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-election-night.jpg\")
Election Night, 1907. Source: Memorial Gallery of Art, University of Rochester<\/p>\n
\n![\"john](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/john-sloan-hairdressers-window.jpg\")
Hairdresser\u2019s Window, 1907. Source: Galleryon<\/p>\n
\n![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-chinese-restaurant.jpg\")
Chinese Restaurant, 1909. Source: Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester<\/p>\n
\n![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-women-drying-hair.jpg\")
Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912. Source: Addison Gallery of American Art<\/p>\n
\n![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-mcsorleys-bar.jpg\")
McSorley\u2019s Bar, 1912. Source: Detroit Institute of Arts<\/p>\n
\n![\"sloan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/sloan-sixth-avenue-el.jpg\")
Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art<\/p>\n