William James Glackens - Washington Square, 1910
New Britain Museum of American Art 2007
William James Glackens
(b.1870, Philadelphia, PA; d.1938, Westport, CT)
Washington Square, 1910
Oil on canvas
William Glackens was born in Philadelphia, where he began his career as a newspaper illustrator and reporter. There he became friends with Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, a group of artists who would become known later as the Ashcan School. Around 1900 these artists moved to New York and worked as illustrators and painters, depicting scenes of everyday life in the growing metropolis. Their scenes focused on the life of the lower- and middle-classes, especially Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, who lived in crowded tenements at the lower end of Manhattan.
One of Glackens' favorite subjects was Washington Square Park, an old city square that separated Greenwich Village, a working-class neighborhood where many Italian immigrants had settled, and the well-to-do neighborhoods north of the square. Glackens drew and painted the view from his studio on the south edge of the square, focusing on the various types of people who frequented the park—children playing, boys with sleds, young tots with their mothers or nannies, people waiting for the bus, groundskeepers, casual strollers, people hurrying through the park on their way to or from work. Glackens' scenes record the mixing of social classes that occurred in New York City, as immigrants were transformed into American citizens.
In his more than twenty paintings of Washington Square between 1909 and 1914, Glackens often repeats certain figures and motifs. He frequently used the tree at the center of the picture to anchor his compositions, many of which depict the same corner as in the New Britain painting. The boy with the sled and the woman walking with her hands in a muff also appear in several pictures. The green bus, seen here driving out of the park at the rear of the picture, is moved to the foreground of the scene in The Green Car (1910; Metropolitan Museum of Art).
What is more obvious is the artist's interest in using the Impressionist style to suggest weather conditions—rain, snow, mud. In the New Britain picture he uses thick brushstrokes of brown paint to suggest the heavy mud that comes with melting snow. The mud, however, is not just made up of one tone, but has other colors—reds, blues, greens—mixed in the brown brushstrokes. Similarly, the snow is not pure white, but has other tones mixed throughout. When he exhibited his Washington Square works in New York's Folsom Gallery in 1913, critics praised his colorful style and the convincing use of brushwork to suggest cloudy, misty weather.
After 1915 Glackens became most famous for his Impressionist still lifes and figure studies, which were often compared to those of the French Impressionist Pierre-August Renoir.
William James Glackens - Washington Square, 1910
New Britain Museum of American Art 2007
William James Glackens
(b.1870, Philadelphia, PA; d.1938, Westport, CT)
Washington Square, 1910
Oil on canvas
William Glackens was born in Philadelphia, where he began his career as a newspaper illustrator and reporter. There he became friends with Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, a group of artists who would become known later as the Ashcan School. Around 1900 these artists moved to New York and worked as illustrators and painters, depicting scenes of everyday life in the growing metropolis. Their scenes focused on the life of the lower- and middle-classes, especially Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, who lived in crowded tenements at the lower end of Manhattan.
One of Glackens' favorite subjects was Washington Square Park, an old city square that separated Greenwich Village, a working-class neighborhood where many Italian immigrants had settled, and the well-to-do neighborhoods north of the square. Glackens drew and painted the view from his studio on the south edge of the square, focusing on the various types of people who frequented the park—children playing, boys with sleds, young tots with their mothers or nannies, people waiting for the bus, groundskeepers, casual strollers, people hurrying through the park on their way to or from work. Glackens' scenes record the mixing of social classes that occurred in New York City, as immigrants were transformed into American citizens.
In his more than twenty paintings of Washington Square between 1909 and 1914, Glackens often repeats certain figures and motifs. He frequently used the tree at the center of the picture to anchor his compositions, many of which depict the same corner as in the New Britain painting. The boy with the sled and the woman walking with her hands in a muff also appear in several pictures. The green bus, seen here driving out of the park at the rear of the picture, is moved to the foreground of the scene in The Green Car (1910; Metropolitan Museum of Art).
What is more obvious is the artist's interest in using the Impressionist style to suggest weather conditions—rain, snow, mud. In the New Britain picture he uses thick brushstrokes of brown paint to suggest the heavy mud that comes with melting snow. The mud, however, is not just made up of one tone, but has other colors—reds, blues, greens—mixed in the brown brushstrokes. Similarly, the snow is not pure white, but has other tones mixed throughout. When he exhibited his Washington Square works in New York's Folsom Gallery in 1913, critics praised his colorful style and the convincing use of brushwork to suggest cloudy, misty weather.
After 1915 Glackens became most famous for his Impressionist still lifes and figure studies, which were often compared to those of the French Impressionist Pierre-August Renoir.