part 2
North American Art

North American Art
Before the Second World War

William Glackens

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William Glackens

born: Philadelphia, Pennsilvania; 13 March 1870
died: Westport, Conneticut; 22 May 1938

American artist, whose paintings of street scenes and middle-class urban life rejected 19th-century academic art and introduced a matter-of-fact realism into the art of the United
States.

Glackens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the same time worked as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Record, the Public Ledger, and The Press. In 1895 he spent a year in Paris and then settled in New York, where he worked as an illustrator for The New York Herald and the New York World. McClure's Magazine sent him to Cuba in 1898 to cover the Spanish-American War. At about the turn of the century he took up painting seriously. "Hammerstein's Roof Garden" (1901), a cabaret scene, was his first important picture.

He joined a group of artists who were also interested in depicting contemporary life. Robert
Henri was the leader of this group, which included John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn as well as the more Romantic painters Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Arthur B. Davies. Known as The Eight, they held one memorable exhibition in 1908, but, because of diversity of viewpoints, they disbanded.

Among Glackens' major early paintings, "Chez Mouquin" (1905) shows a gay New York
restaurant in a vivid and robust manner. Later, he became interested in Impressionism and was particularly influenced by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point 1916	The Green Car 1910	Mother and Baby --Washington Square NYC 1914
May Day in Central Park about 1905	Mahone Bay 1911	Family Group 1911
Cape Cod Pier 1908	Cafe Lafayette	Breakfast Porch 1925

North American Art