John Sloan was born in
Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, on August 2, 1871, to James Dixon Sloan, a man with artistic leanings who made an unsteady income in a succession of jobs, and Henrietta Ireland Sloan, a schoolteacher from an affluent family. Sloan grew up in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lived and worked until 1904, when he moved to New York City. He and his two sisters (Elizabeth and Marianna) were encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. In the fall of 1884 he enrolled at the prestigious
Central High School in Philadelphia, where his classmates included
William Glackens and
Albert C. Barnes. In the spring of 1888, his father experienced a mental breakdown that left him unable to work, and Sloan became responsible, at the age of sixteen, for the support of his parents and sisters. He dropped out of school in order to work full-time as an assistant cashier at Porter and Coates, a bookstore and seller of fine prints. His duties were light, allowing him many hours to read the books and examine the works in the store's print department. It was there that Sloan created his earliest surviving works, among which are pen-and-ink copies after
Dürer and
Rembrandt. He also began making
etchings, which were sold in the store for a modest sum. In 1890, the offer of a higher salary persuaded Sloan to leave his position to work for
A. Edward Newton, a former clerk for Porter and Coates who had opened his own stationery store. At Newton's, Sloan designed greeting cards and calendars and continued to work on his etchings. In that same year he also attended a night drawing class at the
Spring Garden Institute, which provided him his first formal art training. He soon left Newton's business in quest of greater freedom as a freelance commercial artist in 1891, but this venture produced little income. In 1892, he began working as an illustrator in the art department of
The Philadelphia Inquirer. Later that same year, Sloan began taking evening classes at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the guidance of the realist
Thomas Anshutz. Among his fellow students was his old schoolmate William Glackens. In 1892, Sloan met
Robert Henri, a talented painter and charismatic advocate of artistic independence who became his mentor and closest friend. Henri encouraged Sloan in his graphic work and eventually convinced him to turn to painting. They shared a common artistic outlook and in the coming years promoted a new form of realism, known as the "Ashcan school" of American art. In 1893, Sloan and Henri founded the short-lived Charcoal Club together, whose members would also include Glackens,
George Luks, and
Everett Shinn. They were married on August 5, 1901, providing Sloan with an affectionate partner who believed in him absolutely, but whose lapses and mental instability led to frequent crises. A particularly close friend in their New York years, who helped the couple to weather many of these crises, was the artist
John Butler Yeats, the elderly father of poet
William Butler Yeats. By 1903, Sloan had produced almost sixty oil paintings but had yet to establish a name for himself in the art world. and for such journals as ''
Collier's Weekly, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner's''. Sloan participated in the landmark 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries of a group that included four other artists from the Philadelphia Charcoal Club (Henri, Glackens, Luks and Shinn) as well as three artists who worked in a less realistic, more impressionistic style,
Maurice Prendergast,
Ernest Lawson, and
Arthur B. Davies. The group was afterward collectively known as "The Eight." ,
Detroit Institute of Arts Sloan's growing discontent with what he called "the Plutocracy's government" led him to join the
Socialist Party in 1910. Dolly Sloan also became active in Socialist projects at this time. John Sloan became the art editor of
The Masses with the December 1912 issue and contributed powerful anti-war and anti-capitalist drawings to other socialist publications as well, such as the
Call and
Coming Nation. As Sloan was never entirely comfortable with propaganda, his work for these magazines did not always contain overt political content. His belief that "The Masses" was becoming too doctrinaire led to a dispute with fellow editors Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, causing him to resign his position with that journal in 1916. He was never an ally of the
Communist Party in the United States, although he remained hopeful that the
Soviet Union would succeed in creating an egalitarian society. Throughout his life, he identified with left-wing political causes and expressed vehement disapproval of the inequities of
the American economic system. A pacifist, he also opposed the
American entry into World War I. In 1913, Sloan painted a two-hundred-foot backdrop for the
Paterson Strike Pageant, a controversial work of performance art and radical politics organized by activist John Reed and philanthropist
Mabel Dodge. The play, a benefit staged for the striking silk mill workers of Paterson, New Jersey, took place in
Madison Square Garden and incorporated over 1,000 participants. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century". Also in 1913, Sloan participated in the legendary
Armory Show. He served as a member of the organizing committee and also exhibited two paintings and five etchings. In that same year, the important collector
Albert C. Barnes purchased one of Sloan's paintings; this was only the fourth sale of a painting for Sloan (although it has often erroneously been counted as his first). For Sloan, exposure to the European
modernist works on view in the Armory Show initiated a gradual move away from the realist urban themes he had been painting for the previous ten years. In 1914–15, during summers spent in
Gloucester, Massachusetts, he painted landscapes en plein air in a new, more fluid and colorful style influenced by
Van Gogh and the
Fauves. Beginning in 1914, Sloan taught at the
Art Students League, where for the next eighteen years he became a charismatic if eccentric teacher. Sloan also taught briefly at the George Luks Art School. His students respected him for his practical knowledge and integrity, but feared his caustic tongue; as a well-known painter who had nonetheless sold very few paintings, he advised his students, "I have nothing to teach you that will help you to make a living." He disdained careerism among artists and urged his pupils to find joy in the creative process alone. The summer of 1918 was the last he spent in Gloucester. For the next thirty years, he spent four months each summer in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the desert landscape inspired a new concentration on the rendering of form. Still, the majority of his works were completed in New York. As a result of his time in the Southwest, he and Dolly developed a strong interest in
Native American arts and ceremonies and, back in New York, became advocates of Indian artists. In 1922 he organized an exhibition of work by Native American artists at the
Society of Independent Artists in New York. He also championed the work of
Diego Rivera, whom he called "the one artist on this continent who is in the class of the old masters." In 1943, Dolly Sloan died of coronary heart disease. The next year, Sloan married Helen Farr, a former student forty years his junior with whom he had been romantically involved for a time in the 1930s. On September 7, 1951, Sloan died of cancer while vacationing in
Hanover, New Hampshire. The following January the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a well-received retrospective of his career.
Helen Farr Sloan, who became a noted philanthropist in her later years, oversaw the distribution of his unsold works to major museums throughout the country. ==Career==