1907, John Sloan, Gray and Brass -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Gray and Brass dates from the most dynamic year of the former newspaper artist's career as an urban realist, or Ashcan, painter. Sloan was the last of his Philadelphia friends to relocate to New York, in 1904. A self-described "spectator of life," he enthusiastically embraced his new environment, producing paintings and prints of the city's many attractions and mix of social classes. Gray and Brass contrasts the self-satisfied attitudes of wealthy passengers in the flashy "gray and brass" motorcar with a loosely painted grouping of New York's lower classes at rest. It is one of the only Ashcan pictures to juxtapose socio-economic difference in a single composition.
1907, John Sloan, Gray and Brass -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Gray and Brass dates from the most dynamic year of the former newspaper artist's career as an urban realist, or Ashcan, painter. Sloan was the last of his Philadelphia friends to relocate to New York, in 1904. A self-described "spectator of life," he enthusiastically embraced his new environment, producing paintings and prints of the city's many attractions and mix of social classes. Gray and Brass contrasts the self-satisfied attitudes of wealthy passengers in the flashy "gray and brass" motorcar with a loosely painted grouping of New York's lower classes at rest. It is one of the only Ashcan pictures to juxtapose socio-economic difference in a single composition.