John Sloan`S Urban EncoUntErS

J o h n S l oa n ’ s U r ba n E n c o u n t e r s
Figure 2
S p r i n g R a i n, 1912
Oil on canvas, 20¼ × 26¼ inches
Delaware Ar t Museum
Gift of the John Sloan Memorial
Foundation, 1986 (1986-107)
Joyce K. Schiller and Heather Campbell Coyle
An Urban Encounter, ca. 1912
A woman makes her way down a winding footpath, cutting through Union
Square on a rainy day. In the midst of a step, she hitches up her skirts to keep
them dry, an unconscious act. Glimpsed from behind, she is anonymous, wearing the standard black dress and straw hat typical of working-class women, but
individual, wearing red stockings. It’s been raining steadily and for a while; the
wet pavement reflects the red of her stockings and the acid-green of trees in
early spring. She’s not alone in the park; beneath their black umbrellas other
pedestrians are moving through the city; a few steps ahead a man hurries by in
a trench coat. But on a gray day, her bright stockings warrant attention. Across
the park, through the rain, looms the Domestic Sewing Machine Building with
its distinctive cupola. Might she be heading there to work? Do women who work
respectable jobs—as clerks or salesgirls—wear red stockings?
These are questions raised by John Sloan’s Spring Rain [fig. 2], a painting
from 1912 that is typical of the artist’s vision of New York City life in the early
­twentieth century. His interest is the workaday city, and he focuses on the pedestrian’s experience of it. Filling the foreground of his canvas with pavement,
Sloan places the viewer at street level, and the edge of the painting literally cuts
off the figure’s shadow, locating the viewer close behind her. The woman’s red
stockings draw attention to her feet—she is captured mid-step, emphasizing her
pedestrian role—and the red tulips planted around the fountain at the center of
the park draw the viewer through the canvas, anticipating her movement. Sloan
said he painted from memory, and this painting is so vivid and immediate in its
sensual appeal that it appears to be the product of a specific incident, “a glimpse
of an ankle” according to the artist.1
In Spring Rain as in many of Sloan’s pictures, the city becomes a backdrop for
a human encounter, an encounter that is specifically urban. Everyday meetings
between individuals—man and woman, rich and poor, viewer and viewed—are
the stuff of Sloan’s art. Sloan’s New York is made up of people, the streets and
parks they frequent, and the glances they exchange. More than any other artist
of the so-called Ashcan School, Sloan took to heart the poet Walt Whitman’s
­dictum to celebrate the lives of ordinary Americans, creating a vision of New
23
24
J o h n S l oa n ’ s U r b a n E n c ou n t e r s
York that reflected his daily experiences on the
city’s streets. Sloan recorded his urban encounters
in his diary, noting the anecdotal element that
“would be a good thing to paint” and the location
where he observed it.2 Locations were particularly
important to the artist, whose titles often reference
specific places. More often than not, these places
are near his home, in his neighborhood, on streets
that he traveled every day. As Sloan moved around
the city, so did his subjects, and as his relationship
to the city changed, so did his pictures of it. Sloan’s
New York—be it the pedestrian city of Spring Rain
or the sweeping vista of The City from Greenwich
Village—is always personally inflected, grounded in
the artist’s experience of the city life around him.
figure 3
Photog rapher unknown
Group of men at 806 Walnut Street,
ca. 1896
Photog raph, 5j × 8 inches
John Sloan Manuscript Collection
Delaware Ar t Museum
Of Whitman and Walnut Street:
John Sloan in Philadelphia, 1877–1904
John Sloan’s use of New York’s streets, parks, and
people in his paintings and prints can be traced
back to his Philadelphia life and art activities. Born
in Lock Haven in central Pennsylvania, Sloan had
lived in Philadelphia since the age of six. At age
sixteen he left Central High School to work, as his
father could no longer support their family. Within
a few years he was earning a living from art, producing illustrated novelty books, calendars, and cards
at A. Edward Newton and beginning to take classes
at the Spring Garden Institute. In 1892 Sloan began
working as an illustrator for The Philadelphia Inquirer,
one of the city’s major newspapers. That same
year he started taking classes at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts. His work as a news­paper
artist must have taken him around the city to
record various local happenings, though he proved
more adept at producing elegant, stylized pictures
than on-the-spot sketches of newsworthy events.
Despite his knowledge of the city and its suburbs,
the subjects of John Sloan’s early paintings were
isolated to a particular sector of the city, ­centered
around where he kept his studio on Walnut Street.
His major canvases from this period—the works he
sent out to exhibitions—include Fortune Teller’s Birds,
Philadelphia, 1899; Walnut Street Theater, Philadelphia,
1900; Independence Square, Philadelphia, 1900; Tugs,
Delaware River, 1900; Schuylkill River, 1900–1902; East
Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia, 1901; The Rathskeller,
1901; and Dock Street Market, 1903. All are identified in their titles by location, several by the inclusion of “Philadelphia.”3 Clearly, a sense of place—a
specificity of place—was important to the young
­artist. Sloan had never traveled abroad and had
lived only a few months outside the city—in New
York in the summer of 1898—since childhood, and
Philadelphia was his territory. More specifically, a
narrow swath of Center City provided the settings
for nearly all of his city pictures. His artistic ­terrain
stretched as far west as Broad Street and City Hall,
near the Pennsylvania Academy, and as far east as
the Delaware River, north to Market Street, and
south to Cypress Street.4
Sloan’s first studio was on Walnut Street, and
he never strayed far. His second studio, shared with
his fellow illustrator Joe Laub, was at 705 Walnut