Sloan, John

John French Sloan (1871–1951), painter and printmaker, forged a place in American urban history due to his contributions to an urban realist school of art and his support for working-class and Socialist causes in New York City prior to World War I.

Born August 2, 1871, in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Sloan dropped out of high school to help support his parents and siblings. In his spare time, he taught himself etching. He attended art school in 1890 to 1891, but the crucial event in his development as an artist was meeting the painter Robert Henri in 1892. In the late 1890s, Sloan painted Philadelphia city scenes and worked as an illustrator for several Philadelphia newspapers. He married Anna Maria (“Dolly”) Wall in 1901. They moved to New York City in 1904. Between 1905 and 1906, Sloan completed New York City Life, a series of 10 etchings depicting the daily life of ordinary New Yorkers in a sympathetic way. Neither Sloan's technique of using quick strokes to capture the fast-moving pace of the modern metropolis nor his proletarian subject matter was well received by defenders of the era's artistic conventions, the men who dominated the National Academy of Design. In 1908, Sloan, his mentor Robert Henri, and six other painters mounted an independent exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, a challenge to the National Academy of Design's hegemony that won the independents, variously referred to as The Eight or (less accurately) as the Ashcan School, critical acclaim.

Sloan's sympathetic portrayal of lower class people in the pre–World War I era reflected his political outlook during those years. In 1910, he and Dolly joined the Socialist Party and took part in prolabor protests, and on two occasions he ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature on the Socialist ticket. His illustrations appeared regularly in The Call, the leading Socialist Party daily in the city. Sloan also served from 1912 to 1916 as the art editor for The Masses, a radical magazine based in Greenwich Village whose editors, artists, and writers sought to bring about a cultural revolution that would also transform American politics. However, by mid-1916 Sloan had withdrawn from the Socialist Party and cut his ties with The Masses.

Sloan remained a productive artist for many decades after the heyday of urban realism. He also taught classes at the Art Students League in New York between 1916 and 1938. During the 1920s he changed both his painting style and his subject matter, adopting some techniques from the Old Masters and painting more female nudes. Many critics displayed little enthusiasm for his later work. Nevertheless, his art was widely exhibited during the interwar years and in a book titled Gist of Art (1939), written with the aid of his student Helen Farr, he vigorously affirmed his artistic credo.

Dolly Sloan died in May of 1943, and in February of 1944, Sloan married his former student, Helen Farr. There were no children by either marriage. He died in Hanover, New Hampshire on September 7, 1951.