Everett Shinn 1876-1953

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.

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1 There are two digitized archival collections of Shinn papers: Everett Shinn collection, 1877–1958, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) (AAA) (this site provides access to the papers of Everett Shinn in the Archives of American Art that were digitized in 2011. The papers have been scanned in their entirety, and total 2,220 images); and Everett Shinn Papers, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington (the Everett Shinn Papers contain original materials from Shinn, including correspondence, clippings, financial and legal documents, photographs, sketches, and manuscripts, as well as the research materials of Edith DeShazo for her book, Everett Shinn 1876–1953: A Figure in His Time, 1974). Notable published sources on Shinn include: Edith De Shazo, Everett Shinn, 1887–1953: A Figure in His Time (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1974) and Janay Jadine Wong, “The Early Work of Everett Shinn (1897–1911): Art at the Crossroads of a New Century,” Ph.D. Dissertation, 2 vols, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2002. See also Rebecca Zurier, “The Reporter’s Vision: Everett Shinn and the City as Spectacle,” in Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 2006), pp.135–80.
2 Theodore Dreiser, The Genius (New York: John Lane, 1915).