John Sloan

American, 1871–1951

John Sloan was a prominent member of the Ashcan School of painters. Employing impasto brushstrokes and nuanced color, he depicted everyday scenes of New York, as seen in his works Chinese Restaurant (1909) and McSorley’s Bar (1912). Born John French Sloan on August 2, 1871 in Lock Haven, PA, he grew up in Philadelphia where he worked at a print shop as teenager to help support his family. Sloan went on to work as an illustrator for the The Philadelphia Inquirer while enrolled in Thomas Anshutz’s evening painting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. During the early 1890s, Sloan met the artist Robert Henri, who encouraged the younger painter to copy the works of Édouard Manet and Frans Hals. Sloan moved to New York in 1904, where began painting the lives of working class people amidst the backdrop of Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. The artist’s empathy towards his subject’s difficult lives led him to join the Socialist Party in 1910. From 1918 onward, Sloan spent each summer in Santa Fe, NM, where he painted the landscape as well as the local Native American tribes. The artist died on September 7, 1951 in Hanover, NH. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

Courtesy artnet