Sold at Auction: John (1871) Sloan

(b Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, 1871; d Hanover, New Hampshire, 1951) American painter. A native of Pennsylvania, John Sloan made his home in New York but also lived in Santa Fe every summer for some thirty years; from 1920 to 1950. As a teen, he worked for a dealer in old-master prints and hand copied as many as he could to train himself to be an artist. His first formal art lessons came at Spring Garden Institute in Philadelphia; then he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Robert Henri and Thomas Anschutz. Sloan worked at the Philadelphia Press with fellow artist/reporters William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn. Before photography became common, they made on-the-spot sketches of news events. Sloan began working for a New York newspaper in 1898, and by 1904 his three Philadelphia buddies were all in New York, with Henri, and continued painting under his tutelage. In 1907 Henri established a new artists' group called "The Eight," espousing the reality of commonplace urban subjects and an artist's right to paint however and whatever he wanted, thus eschewing the in-formal academic system in America, as the Impressionists shunned the more formal academic system in Europe more than thirty years earlier. With the sensibilities of a Cubist, Sloan believed that space must be constructed as well as painted and represented in terms of overlapping surface planes with both linear and color recession schemes. The result is an energetic surface, representative of both the physical location and Sloan's interest in the plastic qualities of nature. (Credit: Santa Fe Art Auctions, Santa Fe, 2004 Art Auction, November 13, 2004, lot 166)