Born Robert Henry Cozad, Robert shared a lineage with Mary Cassatt, making them cousins. Henri kept that relationship secret as much as he did his birth name, in an effort to erase a murder conviction against his father John Cozad. Robert's childhood reads like a Bret Harte short story. From card shark to real estate speculator, Henri's father moved the family from Cincinnati to Nebraska in a series of speculative land development projects. A disgruntled employee attacked Robert's father, and in self-defense his gun fired, killing the attacker. The murder conviction, later pardoned, led to the family's fleeing to Colorado, and assuming new identities.

Robert Henri was sent to boarding school in New York, where he showed talent in writing and theater -- creative endeavors encouraged by his mother. He discounted his creativity, thinking "artists surprised their parents... by doing masterpieces in their infancy... and [he] was not of that class" (Perlman). Nevertheless, painting buildings his father acquired in Atlantic City and producing political cartoons and color sketches for a small "museum" in his father's store caught the attention of admirers who encouraged Robert's art. James Albert Cathcart persuaded Henri to study at his alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Henri enrolled in 1886.

Henri entered the Academy eight months after Thomas Eakins resigned under pressure from a scandal that broke out over his removal of a loincloth from a nude model. Despite Eakins’s absence, his strong influence on the curriculum at PAFA remained and it affected Henri profoundly. Eakins had instituted new educational policies at the Academy that were some of the most progressive in the country. Under his direction, students learned to value realism and its application to distinctly American subjects. It was in this mode of instruction that Henri cultivated his own artistic style and philosophy.

Thomas Anshutz played an important role in Henri’s development as an artist. He upheld many of Eakins’s ideas and continued to build upon his teaching method; however, Anshutz was also open to change and cultivated individual artistic expression. He encouraged his students’ idiosyncrasies; advocated close observation and a firm grasp of anatomy as the basis for good art; and he prompted his students to paint the world around them. Henri valued Anshutz’s criticism greatly, and determined to succeed as an artist, he worked tirelessly as his student.

After studying for three years in Paris from 1888 to 1891, Henri returned to Philadelphia and the halls of the Academy. With richer experience and increased confidence, he began to develop and promote the artistic philosophy that would come to define the remainder of his career. Steeped in Anshutz’s call for realism and plain painting without bravura, Henri challenged himself and the other artists he influenced to “paint what you feel . . . paint what is real to you.” And so began his lifelong pursuit of painting “life in the raw,” without what he deemed “academic artifice.” He promoted this credo to his many students and perhaps popularized it most in his sensational 1908 exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in New York, where he and a group of artists, eventually called The Eight, mounted a show that was a direct affront to the National Academy of Design’s rejection of their work and the modernist spirit that shaped them as artists.

"The Eight" or the Ashcan School, were extolled for their gritty portrayals of urban life. They shared the common ideals that valid artistic subject matter for fine art and artistic expression could be found in everyday life. Henri, himself, created his most compelling work when painting subjects who possessed “a quality of inner intensity.” 
This portrait of Celestine captures that intensity and “art spirit” that defined Henri’s finest work. His great admiration of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Frans Hals and the French painter Edouard Manet is evident in his treatment of the composition, as the figure comes to life in the immediate foreground and confronts the viewer with an arresting gaze. Executed with his signature bold and rapid brushwork, the painting captures the sitter's vitality. Henri’s exceptional powers of observation are expressed with broad strokes of energy and movement, heightening the solidity of Celestine's form and the power of her countenance.