William Glackens

An early member of the so-called Ashcan school of realist artists who portrayed the urban scene, William Glackens later adopted the bright colors, broken brushwork, and leisure subjects that characterize American impressionism. Glackens was a Philadelphia native. As a young man he worked as an artist-reporter for local newspapers and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Inspired by the dark colors, vigorous brushwork, and ideals of artistic freedom of painter Robert Henri, mentor to Philadelphia's community of progressive artists and illustrators, Glackens traveled with him to France. There his choice of subjects and compositions was further influenced by the work of the impressionist artists, particularly the radically cropped urban images of their mentor, Édouard Manet (1832–1883). On his return to the United States in 1896, Glackens took up residence in New York City and worked as an illustrator while painting the city around him. Soon he joined several associates from his former days in Philadelphia, realist painters of city subjects who were later dubbed the Ashcan school by a derisive critic.

After a return visit to Europe in 1906, Glackens's style began to shift dramatically. As he responded to the softened outlines and brilliant colorism of French impressionist painter Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), he adopted a bright range of colors emphasizing orange and violet. Equally influential were the bright light and colors of the beach: in 1908, the artist and his family began summering at a variety of coastal locales ranging from Nova Scotia to Bellport, on New York's Long Island, which provided him with many subjects. Glackens also made a specialty of painting New York City's parks, typically showing them filled with a variety of social types enjoying themselves in all seasons, especially winter. Glackens eventually realized a modest financial success: by 1919 sales of his art, along with a small independent income, allowed him finally to abandon commercial work to paint full-time.

Committed to progressive causes in art, Glackens was involved in organizing a number of ground-breaking exhibitions, notably the so-called Armory Show of 1913, which first brought European modernism to a wide American public. Glackens was represented in the exhibition, but by that date his work was firmly allied with the cheerful colors and subjects of the now-conservative mode of impressionism. The French tendency that critics noted in Glackens's work was confirmed by an eight-year stay in the south of France, beginning in 1925, during which he made regular visits to New York.

Glackens rarely made portraits, but figural compositions, especially those showing family members and friends, became increasingly important in his work, along with nudes, pure landscapes, and multi-figural genre scenes. In his last decade he turned to painting still-lifes, especially of brightly tinted flowers. When Glackens died suddenly at the age of sixty-eight, he was considered an elder statesman in the American art community and was accorded a memorial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.