John Sloan often explored the leisure activities of working-class women and the changing social mores of the 20th century. Here he focused on three women who sit together at the central table of a popular Italian restaurant in New York City. By showing the women celebrating a night out on the town, the artist emphasized their newfound freedom to socialize in public spaces without the need for male escorts. Although he indicated their working-class status through their “unladylike” gestures—legs wrapped around their chairs and pinkies flared in the air—Sloan did not cast judgment on the women’s relaxed behavior. His informal style and loose brushwork enliven this scene of urban leisure with a sense of immediacy and action.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Edward Alden Jewell, “Art by ‘Realists’ Put on Exhibition,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 1937, 20.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 327–329, no. 173.
Judith Barter et al., Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 32–33, 125, 192, 226, cat. 63, fig. 18 (ill.).
David Peters Corbett, “Die Ashcan School: Lebensbilder der New Yorker und ihrer Stadt,” in Es war einmal in Amerika – 300 Jahre US-amerikanische Kunst [Once Upon a Time in America: Three Centuries of American Art], eds. Barbara Schaefer and Anita Hachmann (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud/Wienand Verlag, 2018), 167, fig. 9 (ill.).
Yang Zhigang, ed., Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, exh. cat. (Shanghai: Shanghai Book and Painting Press, 2018), cat. 44.
Whitney Museum, New York, New York Realists, 1900–1914: Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, Glenn O. Coleman, and Guy Pène du Bois, Feb. 9–Mar. 5, 1937.
South Bend Art Association, IN, American Painting in the Manner of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Feb. 10–Mar. 31, 1948.
Washington DC, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their Lives, 1897–1917, Nov. 17, 1995–Mar. 17, 1996.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young, Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama–Pacific International Exposition, Oct. 17, 2015–Jan. 10, 2016, cat. 69.
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 44.
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