Among the prominent group of American urban Realists who formed the Eight, Everett Shinn infused his art, in several media, with a sense of immediacy, vitality, and action, capturing the grit, fashions, and pleasures of modern urban life in the early twentieth century.1 In his 1915 novel, The Genius, Theodore Dreiser used Shinn as the basis for his protagonist, Eugene Witla, a dapper, talented artist who becomes an illustrator and painter in New York City, while carrying on a series of amorous affairs.2 In his early career, Shinn found his subject matter by roaming the streets of New York City. However, he is best known for his colorful renderings of the theater, especially the performers associated with vaudeville. A multi-talented artist, he was also successful as a muralist, decorator, set designer, and playwright.

Shinn developed his interest in the theater during his childhood when he often watched parades and attended carnivals in his native Woodstown, New Jersey. His career as an artist began in 1888, when his parents sent him to study mechanical drawing in Philadelphia. There, he enrolled at the Spring Garden Institute, while working as a chandelier designer for Thackeray Gas Fixture Works. His job did not last long; he was fired when he was found drawing street scenes on the margins of his papers. At the time, the company foreman advised him: You have the gift to draw—do it because you can.”3 Shinn followed this recommendation. In 1893, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He continued his studies in his spare time until 1897. Concurrently, he began working as an artist-reporter for the Philadelphia Press.

Along with his associate at the newspaper, George Luks, Shinn soon became part of “the Philadelphia Four,” which also included the like-minded artist-reporters William Glackens and John Sloan. A gathering place for this group was the Walnut Street studio of Robert Henri, who encouraged his colleagues to seek artistic self-expression, capturing life in the moment. Henri also shared his awareness of modern French art, acquired on two trips to Europe (1888 and 1895–97).

In 1897, Shinn moved to New York City to work as an illustrator for the New York World, in whose art department Glackens and Luks were already employed. In the following year, he married the artist Florence (Flossie) Scovel, and in 1899, both artists were hired by Ainslee’s Magazine, and Shinn was made art director. With Flossie’s income, he was able to devote his attention to pastel. At the time engraving was being replaced in magazine reproductions by the halftone process. Thus, Shinn was motivated to expand his art beyond reportage, and pastel, along with watercolor and gouache, provided him with a way to work freely in the manner of an illustrator but in a more artistic and subjectively expressive manner. In such works, he hoped to attract the attention of general-interest magazines. Indeed, he was soon selling the rights to his images to Ainslee’s along with Harper’s Weekly, Century, McClure’s and Scribner’s.

Several solo exhibitions of Shinn’s pastels were held between 1899 and 1904. His first was in January 1899 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, featuring mostly New York scenes. In February of the following year, the architect Stanford White organized Shinn’s first New York exhibition. It was held at Boussod, Valadon, a successor in the city to Goupil’s. Again Shinn displayed mostly New York street scenes. In January 1901, after a trip made by the Shinns to Europe from May through October 1900, Boussod, Valadon held another exhibition of Shinn’s art. In the show, titled Paris Types, Shinn featured fashionable Parisiennes as well as scenes in London and of the theater. He returned to the display of New York subjects in an exhibition held in March 1903 at New York’s Knoedler Gallery. By the following year, Shinn had begun concentrating on entertainers and theatrical performances, which were the subject of many of the pastels he included in a show at New York’s Durand-Ruel Galleries in March.

In February 1908, Shinn participated in the one and only exhibition of the Eight, held at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, along with Henri, Glackens, Luks, and Sloan as well as Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B. Davies. A landmark event in the annals of American art, the exhibition was filled with urban imagery, and its views of slums, alleyways and bleaker sections of Manhattan (breaking from the genteel views of American Impressionists), led the group later be called the “Ashcan School.”

In the years that followed, Shinn expanded his artistic repertoire to include mural painting, including decorations for private homes and commissions for public buildings—among them the Belasco Theatre and the Stuyvesant Theatre in New York and City Hall in Trenton, New Jersey. From 1917 to 1923, he worked as a set designer and art director in Hollywood, first for Goldwyn Pictures and briefly for William Randolph Heart’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. On returning to New York in 1923, he resumed his activity as a painter and illustrator, focusing once again on images of the theater. In the 1940s, he returned to depicting urban themes.

Shinn married three additional times and died in New York in 1953 from lung cancer.

The Work

Rendered in charcoal, gouache, and pastel, the present work is among Shinn’s largest works on paper (fig. 1). It bears the faint but unmistakable last three capital letters of his signature on the lower left (and a partial view of the H preceding them). Clearly the full signature was once present (and possibly a date). The site of the work is readily recognizable as New York’s East River, due to the presence of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge at the right and left.4 It was probably rendered in 1898 due to its close resemblance to a work in gouache and charcoal, Barges on the East River (20 by 27 inches, private collection), which is signed and dated lower left: “Everett Shinn / 1898” (fig. 2).5 Barges on the East River was shown with the title of East River, Sunset in Shinn’s March 1903 exhibition at Knoedler Gallery, which included a second East River scene: East River, Night. The works were numbers 1 and 2 in the catalogue. A reviewer for the Chicago Record Herald described East River, Sunset:

Commendable and impressive are two descriptions of the East River, one by night, the other by sunset. . . . Less poetic but equally notable is the river at sunset, which is stunning in color. An orange-red light lingers in the sky—the light mirrored in the blackish stream, and saucy tugs puffing black smoke, dart in and out and around schooners, their yellow sails loosened for furling. In the foreground is a packet boat the figures of several musicians on its deck dimly outlined. It is a flotilla of merchandise, a scene familiar to all who live a large city where marine pursuits are important.6

The Chicago Record reviewer also described East River, Night, observing that it was a “nocturne in blue and gold . . . made evidently from the deck of a boat” with tall buildings “blossoming like stars in the heavens” in the distance.” 7 It is clear that the present work was not East River Night and no extant work by Shinn can be matched to it. However, Shinn produced a third work in the series, depicting the East River in the morning. This is apparent in his Account Book of Art Work Loaned to Various Exhibitions, 1899–1912 (Archives of American Art), in which he noted on February 1902 that he gave reproduction rights to Harper’s Weekly for three works: “New York Riverfronts—1. Sunset; 2. Morning; 3 Night” (fig. 3).8 Harper’s seems to have chosen only to reproduce one of the works. The Sunset image appeared in the magazine in July 1902 with the caption “The Soft Coal Nuisance in New York” (fig. 4).9 This caption was no doubt selected by Harper’s because there is no clear evidence of coal in the work (although the barges at the center of the work could be transporting coal). The image reproduced in Harper’s is more expansive than that in East River, Sunset. The perspective is broader and the skyline lower. On the right side of the work, the tower of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side of the river is visible with the Manhattan shore behind it. In the left foreground, the schooner has tighter sails and more of the packet boat is visible, including two rather than one musician. This suggests that either Shinn created a second image of this subject or that at some point, he cut it down and made some changes to it.10

The three East River works are not otherwise catalogued in Shinn’s records, probably because he rendered them in 1898 before he began keeping his Account Book. What seems likely is that the present work was Shinn’s morning image of the East River and that it was rendered in 1898.11 Perhaps he sold it before the 1903 Knoedler exhibition. Whereas appropriately he rendered his view of the river and bridge at sunset looking west toward the sunset and Manhattan (this is apparent in the Harper’s illustration), in his morning image, he took the opposite perspective, looking east toward the sunrise and Brooklyn. He perhaps rendered the view from South Street on a northeast angle. In the scene, the sun is low in the sky, appearing to rise from beneath the bridge. There it casts a strong light on the river, enhanced by the electric light cast down on the water from the bridge’s roadbed. Against the patch of shimmering light, the dark shape of a steamer is silhouetted. Its smoke curls upward and expands as it blends in the clouds, while the light reflected on the river continues its curvature, serving to unify the design by balancing its horizontality with a vertical emphasis. The time of day is also indicated by a rowboat and tugboat in the foreground that appear to head out onto the river. At night they would be returning to the harbor.

Although Shinn’s original title for the work cannot be verified, East River, Morning is fitting to it, along with a date of ca. 1898. It is quite interesting that Shinn depicted the bridge and the East River in 1898—one year after he arrived in New York. After a long campaign, on January 1 of that year, Brooklyn became one of New York’s five boroughs. Previously it had been a separate city. Thus, the bridge gained new symbolic resonance at the time, as a unifier of a “greater New York.” Other innovations had also occurred on the bridge just a few years earlier. Although the bridge had been electrified at the time it was completed in 1883, it was not until 1895 that electric wires for trolleys were laid down on it.12 A year later, electric train cars began to run across it. In Shinn’s image, the lights concentrated at the center of the bridge could represent the headlights of a train carrying early morning commuters to work. With his years as a newspaper illustrator, Shinn would been drawn to such a subject, as a means of conveying a sense of a present event as it was occurring. In the passing train, combined with the steamer that has just crossed under the bridge, Shinn conveys a sense in the work of the city waking up.

East River, Morning demonstrates Shinn’s preference for plunging perspectives as a means of establishing both depth and immediacy. His overhead angle draws our attention to the shimmer of the bridge’s necklace of lights, floating as if by magic above the river and the horizon line. At the same time, we look down on the foreshortened forms in the foreground, in which Shinn used charcoal with the confident fluidity attained in his years as a newspaper illustrator. Although he worked quickly, sketching rather than delineating forms precisely, he included many intriguing and observant details. In the left corner of the work, two figures are in a small rowboat, and their insecurity on the rough water of the river is apparent. One, sitting in the prow with a cigarette hanging from his mouth (rendered with a dash of white chalk), grasps the side of the boat to steady himself. The other figure holds both oars above the level of the water waiting for it to be less turbulent, while looking behind him, perhaps warily eyeing an approaching steamer.

Cropped along the middle and right edge of the work are industrial vessels. A barge is loaded with barrels and chained to a tug- or towboat, in which Shinn recorded many details: a couple lights in the lower cabin, a steep ladder between decks, rigging, and a lifeboat on the top deck. From its smokestack, steam pours out, indicating that it is moving forward. Shinn rendered the smokestack’s tip with red chalk, making it the focal point for our gaze. The vertical of the smokestack creates a diagonal line to the smokestack on the approaching steamer, conveying the dynamic movement in both directions on the river. Shinn rendered other vessels with soft, broken lines, create a radiating recession along Brooklyn shore, where with white chalk, he revealed the impact of the rising sun and the light from bridge.

In the work, Shinn delighted in the opportunity to record the blending in New York of natural and artificial light. Using a palette of grays and browns in keeping with his urban subject, he incorporated the paper’s brownish tone into his design in the manner of Whistler’s nocturnes, by blending layers of wet gouache into it. With vigorous brush movements, of which Henri would have approved, he combined pastel and charcoal in the sky to create a dynamic atmosphere of fog and mist becoming infused with sunlight. On the water, he left areas of the paper visible in a calmer area on the right while using charcoal and white chalk with quick movements for the more active surface at the left and to capture the flickering sunlight glancing off the water’s surface. In the hazier atmosphere at the right, he used thin charcoal lines for the tower, latticing, and cables on the Manhattan side of the bridge and other vessels below it.

Shinn’s East River, Morning can be contrasted with the Cubist-inspired images of the bridge by modernists, such as Joseph Stella, John Marin, Albert Gleizes, and Georgia O’Keeffe, created from the 1910s through the 1940s. Whereas their works are stylized and symbolic, showing the bridge as an iconic form, Shinn expressed his emotive firsthand response to his subject. Rendered in the period when he had had newly arrived in New York, East River Morning conveys the excitement he felt at the beauty and energy of the newly expanded city. The work is an exciting rediscovery.
Shinn’s extant works include only a few other images of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge is visible in the right distance in a small pastel New York Harbor, ca. 1898 (fig. 5). An image looking up from below the bridge where its necklace of lights can be seen, reproduced in Jesse Lynch Williams’ New York Sketches, 1902 (fig. 6), was probably by Shinn (although the signature is unclear). Shinn returned to the bridge subject in a couple works in his late career.13

Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.
Thanks are due to Janay Wong for consultation on the research on this work.

4 When it was completed in 1883, the first fixed crossing over the East River, was considered one of the eight wonders of the world. Over a mile long, it was longer and taller than any previous suspension bridge. The bridge was designed by the German-born civil engineer John Augustus Roebling and completed by his son Washington Roebling, after his father’s death in 1869. For artists’ images of the bridge, see Richard Haw, Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History (New York: Routledge, 2008).
5 It is reproduced with this title in Joseph J. Kwiat, “’Genius’ and Everett Shinn, the ‘Ash-Can’ Painter,” in PMLA 67 (March 1952), between pages 22 and 23. The caption reads “formerly in the possession of Knoedler Galleries.” It was also reproduced in Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1995).
6 “Art Notes,” Chicago Record Herald, March 22, 1902. Thanks are due to Janay Wong for sending the complete article. The second half of the article is missing from the version in the Shinn Scrapbooks on the AAA website.
7 The full description reads: “The night effect is a nocturne in blue and gold, the study evidently made from the deck of a boat. The deep, dull blue water rises and falls in choppy waves, and craft of all kinds move on its surface, their lights flickering like fireflies. In the distance the mellow lights in the tall buildings blossom like stars in the heavens and an outline shafts, pinnacles, minarets and domes seem too transient, too efflugent to be the result of man’s handiwork.” Chicago Record Herald.
8 Everett Shinn Papers, Box 1, Folder 64: Account Book of Art Work Loaned to Various Exhibitions, 1899–1912 (AAA).
9 The same information appears in image 40 in Account Book of Art Work Used in Publications and Loaned for Exhibitions, 1898–1911, Everett Shinn collection, AAA, Box 1, Folder 63, image 40. The book also lists some works that were sold or sent out for illustration. Works with the following titles may or may not depict the Brooklyn Bridge: Under the Bridge (1899, Kit-Kat Club); Riverfront (1900, Boussod-Valadon); Riverfront (1901, New York School of Art); Riverfront (1901, South Carolina Interstate); Sunset, East River (1902, Fellowship Sketch Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts); East River, Gray Morning (December 18, 1902, sold to Mr. Charles H. Russell, 129 E. 34th Street); Riverfront (1903, Art Club of Erie, Pennsylvania); East River Night and East River Sunset (1903, Knoedler & Co., New York); East River, Night (1903, Fellowship Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, sent on to East Bethlehem, Pennsylvania); Riverfront (1903, Art Institute of Chicago); Riverfront (1903, sent to Ives Process, 550 W 25 St., for reproduction; this was returned in 1904); East River— Winter (1905, E Gimpel and Wildenstein); Misty Night on River (1907, McClee’s Galleries, Philadelphia—may depict the North River).
10 Janay Wong, email, October 4, 2022 states that it was not uncommon for Shinn to create very similar versions of the same subject.
11 Wong, email October 4, 2022, agrees with this dating.
12 The bridge was the first to be illuminated by electricity at night, generated by its own power plant on the Brooklyn side. Arc lighting was used on the bridge before Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb.
13 East River Bridge, 1940, watercolor on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in, sold Sothebys, New York, for $44,810 in 2002. Fulton Ferry, Brooklyn, pastel on paper, 12 1/2 x 18 inches, sold Bonhams, New York, for $75,315.