an “artist, sign painter, draftsman, engineer, designer, writer, composer, actor, teacher, carpenter, mechanic and theatre impresario.” (Even this list was not complete, however, Shinn having also made his mark as a decorator, puzzle maker, and motion-picture art director.) But simply as an artist he differed in important ways from his fellows: he preferred pastel chalks to oil paints, and although he was the first Ashcan-school painter actually to depict an ash can (in a 1901 pastel, Early Morning, Paris), he soon thereafter lost interest in lower-class life and sought inspiration instead in fashionable parts of town and in the glittering, artificial world of the theater. Theatricality, in fact, pervaded all his work, so that in representing, for example, a city street, he would show it at night, lighted by streetlamps, or in a rainstorm, or both, with bundled-up passersby scurrying along the sidewalks. These dramatic urban nocturnes and his vivid, sympathetic portraits of entertainers performing were highly popular, but they appealed to sophisticated art lovers, too, by virtue of their painterly qualities. So it was hardly surprising that those New York galleries that ordinarily disdained to show the work of any American painters, let alone ones as far removed from the mainstream as were most of The Eight, happily displayed his. Decades afterward, Shinn was to denigrate these turn-of-the-century showrooms as “plush grottoes where the cadavers were displayed in sumptuous coffins,” yet his willingness to use them at the time was not hypocritical. Ever avid for dollars, he believed all his life in the marketplace and deferred to its judgments. It was in this respect, surely, that he was most unlike his fellow members of The Eight, idealists all who declined to paint for any market.

During his long and singularly varied career, Shinn was to have recourse to several painting styles, but in his early work, on which his reputation chiefly rests, he hewed with some consistency to a kind of cisatlantic impressionism based on a dark, limited palette.

Protean, mercurial, and greatly gifted—the most conspicuously gifted of The Eight—Shinn was also energetic, industrious, and determined. Though extraordinarily facile, he was never altogether satisfied with what he had done and was forever finding ways to improve on it. Yet he did not become the foremost American painter of his time or even of his group. Just why he didn’t cannot be explained in a few words, but on reviewing his life, it is hard not to conclude that a person can be too talented, too versatile, too inventive for his own good.

Everett Shinn was born on November 7, 1876, in Woods town, New Jersey, second of three sons of the pretty wife of a Quaker bank employee whose family had been established in the town for generations. The senior Shinns were indulgent parents, and their Ev learned early that he could get his way simply by lying down on the floor and screaming. While growing up, he delighted in feats of

daring, in winter skating on ice just thick enough to support his weight and in summer riding his bicycle along the gutter that skirted the roof of his house. Once, he strung a wire between two trees and practiced tightrope walking, and when a traveling circus came to town, he watched the acrobats especially closely.

He started to draw in the lower grades of his day school, a Quaker academy. By the time he graduated, he had become fascinated with mechanics, and he enrolled at the Spring Garden Institute in nearby Philadelphia to study mechanical drawing. During afternoons in the machine shop there, he devised a rotary engine with only seven parts. “It wasted too much steam to be efficient,” he later recalled, “but it worked.”

After two years at the institute, young Shinn took a job in the drafting room of the Thackeray Gas Fixture Works. Soon, however, the repetitiveness of his duties got to him; bored with having to reproduce every detail of a chandelier, he turned to the margin of his drawing and there sketched, from memory, Philadelphia’s Broad Street, with hansom cabs and hurrying pedestrians. He was found out, bawled out, and kicked out, but his supervisor showed understanding. “Go to an art school, young man,” he advised him on parting. “You have the gift to draw—do it because you can and I can’t.”

The next fall, Shinn enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Then, fearful that his father might cut off his allowance on learning he had not gone to Swarthmore College as planned, he found his way to the office of the Philadelphia Press and landed a job as an artist-reporter. Reporting fires, strikes, train wrecks, highway accidents, elections, murders, suicides, and other events in pen-and-ink sketches—here was work for a very junior draftsman that was anything but boring! Shinn, not yet 17, quickly taught himself to fix in mind the details of a newsworthy spectacle while jotting down pertinent information on handy scraps of paper. He then dashed back to the office to reproduce the scene faithfully, in swift pen strokes, for the waiting photoengraver.

Because he attended the Pennsylvania Academy by day, Shinn worked on the newspaper’s graveyard shift. At first he lived alone in a furnished room. Early in 1894, however, 26-year-old George B. Luks, back in America after a decade of study and travel in Europe, joined the Press’ art staff, and the two moved into a small apartment on Girard Avenue. At just under five and a half feet, Luks was about Shinn’s height but a lot stockier. Luks was a regular at O’Malley’s across the street from the Press building, where, in Shinn’s words, “his rumbling advance along a bar rail was like a tank rolling on with a child at the wheel and all guns popping cork.” For his part, the hard-drinking Luks deplored his roommate’s abstinence.

“Shinn,” he would tell him, “you’ve got a hell of a lot of promise, but you’ll never make the grade. And why won’t you? You don’t drink. That’s sad. Licker does it, licker and nothing else…”

But Shinn soon did make the grade, to the extent of being hired away from the Press by the Philadelphia Inquirer. There he met the staff artist John Sloan, five years his senior, who was sharing a studio with Robert Henri, and before long he and Luks were, at Sloan’s invitation, repairing on Tuesday evenings to 806 Walnut Street for earnest discussions, centered on music or literature as often as on art, with other young men, artists and art students. Henri, at 29, the group’s mentor, revered the great realist painter Thomas Eakins, who had taught at the academy until he was dismissed for insisting on using nude male models in his life classes and who sought, as he said, to “peer deeper into the heart of American life.” Henri used the weekly discussions to expound his own similar vision of art as a medium for expressing life and especially humanity. All this was too much for Luks, who soon stopped coming, and pretty much over the head of the eighteen-year-old Shinn, preoccupied with dating girls and adding to his flashy wardrobe; but the youth did enjoy the company of his fellow artist-reporters, one of whom, quiet William J. Glackens of the Philadelphia Ledger, 24, was to become his closest friend among The Eight.

Over the next year, Shinn and Luks bounced around among the Press, Inquirer, and Evening Bulletin, while Sloan, lacking the speed of execution needed to cover spot news, stayed with the Inquirer, working mostly on its Sunday supplement. Henri taught at Philadelphia’s School of Design for Women until May 1895, when he and Glackens went to Europe to sketch, paint, and look around. In January 1896, the Evening Bulletin sent Shinn’s former roommate, Luks, to Cuba to cover an insurrection but then fired him for not filing his work on time; after sailing to New York City, Luks got a job on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, turning out America’s first regular comic panel, The Yellow Kid, in place of its creator, Richard F. Outcault, who by then was producing his own Yellow Kid for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Hearst’s raids on the World’s art staff created vacancies, and when Glackens came home from Europe jobless, Luks found him work drawing cartoons; then he talked his boss into luring Shinn to the World with a three-dollar-a-week raise. Thus, by the winter of 1897–98, three-quarters of the quartet known to art history as the Philadelphia Four had moved

permanently to New York; the fourth, Sloan, was not to join them until 1904.

Meanwhile, Shinn’s good friend Glackens, tiring of cartooning, had resumed his old occupation at the New York Herald, and when, in April 1898, the United States went to war with Spain—in part as a consequence of strident war-mongering by the Journal and the World—McClure’s sent him to Cuba to cover the fighting there, a job that he ably did until the August armistice.

And Shinn? Having, late in 1897, turned twenty-one and begun to earn the same number of dollars weekly, he set out to woo Florence Scovel, a Pennsylvania Academy student and budding illustrator. Pretty, witty, and talented, Flossie Scovel was related to Philadelphia’s Biddle family, and Shinn had to submit to being scrutinized by representatives of that exalted clan. His occupation can hardly have commended him to them, and his natty appearance—like a jockey dressed to go out on the town, someone said—was not calculated to win their confidence either; but, whatever they thought of him, he and Flossie were married on June 26, 1898.

By then, Henri, too, was married; he was living and painting in Paris, but such was his influence, even in absentia, that both Sloan and Glackens were busily working away in oils in their spare time. Glackens, now sharing an apartment with Luks, persuaded the latter to take up brushes, too, while Shinn began on his own to experiment with pastel chalks. If Henri had turned the first two draftsmen into painters (“He could make anyone want to be an artist,” Sloan was to say), New York itself helped do the same to the others.

Aware that advances in photographic reproduction would soon eliminate his job, Shinn resolved to get into the better paid and more prestigious field of magazine illustration. One showcase that illustrators particularly prized was the center spread of Harper’s Weekly, the preserve of Charles Dana Gibson and Edwin Austin Abbey, and, late in 1898, Shinn made up his mind to crash it. He began turning up at the magazine’s office on Fridays but by his account never even got so far as untying the strings of his ever-thicker portfolio. After a year of this, he despaired of selling his wares and instead simply left them at Harper’s with an explanatory note. On returning the following week, he was shown into the presence of Colonel George Harvey, the editor and publisher, who was leafing through his sketches and finished pastels.

“You have here,” Harvey began, “such a variety of New York street scenes.” Had Shinn, by chance, a large color drawing of the Metropolitan Opera House in a snowstorm?

Shinn pretended to consider the matter. “I think I have,” he said.

“Good,” said Harvey. “Have it here at 10:00 tomorrow morning.”

The artist labored over the picture all night to give

it the requisite look of having been effortlessly dashed off and arrived at Colonel Harvey’s office light-headed. The editor studied the pastel. “We have to decide on a price,” he said at last. “How about $400 and you own the original?”

When the issue of Harper’s Weekly containing his center spread came out in mid-February 1900, Shinn could feel that he had arrived on the national scene. And later that month the Boussod, Valadon Galleries launched a one-man show of his pastels, to notices that were nearly all favorable.

During his year-long siege of Harper’s Weekly, Shinn had done portraits of the actresses Julia Marlowe and Elsie de Wolfe and the prolific playwright Clyde Fitch. De Wolfe, then about to become a decorator, had introduced Shinn to Stanford White, who liked his pastels well enough to arrange for his first big exhibition at Boussod, Valadon. Thanks to this timely boost by the era’s most celebrated architect and the town’s preeminent tastemaker, Shinn’s work would be displayed during the opening years of the century in the very plushest of New York’s “plush grottoes”: again at Boussod, Valadon (J. P. Morgan bought two pictures), then at Kraushaar’s, Knoedler’s, Durand-Ruel, and E. Gimpel and WiIdenstein.

Shinn found himself before long turning out murals, screens, and ornamental panels for houses and apartments that de Wolfe decorated and for urban and rural mansions White designed and built. On jobs of this kind he sought inspiration in the art of the eighteenth-century French court painters Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard, producing nymphs and satyrs, cupids and lovers, shepherds and shepherdesses imbued with a delicacy and airy grace no other member of The Eight could have equaled. He employed this rococo-revival style as well to decorate the ceilings of a new house and two ornate pianos of Clyde Fitch’s. The grateful playwright, chronically short of cash, paid him with a pair of gold chairs and a mahogany table.

It was through Fitch that Shinn met the impresario David Belasco. Sometime after Stanford White’s fatal shooting by Harry K. Thaw in 1906, Belasco commissioned Shinn to paint eighteen large murals for a new Broadway theater, the Stuyvesant. Stagestruck though he was all his life, the artist remained unimpressed by this dominant figure on the theatrical scene, whom he considered a “colossal faker.” Nor did he fall for his flattery. “Belasco knew,” he explained long afterward, “that Stanford White had been my friend and that by my proximity to his unerring taste I must have gleaned something of selectivity. It assured him of guidance toward those objects that would advertise still further his reputation for impeccable taste.”

With money flowing in from his magazine work and private commissions, Shinn had bought a brick house at 112 Waverly Place, a few doors west of Washington Square, in the entrance hall of which Clyde Fitch’s table and chairs now occupied an honored place. From New York,

on February 16, 1904, he and Flossie entrained to Hartford, Connecticut, for the wedding of Bill Glackens, at 34, the last bachelor holdout of the old Philadelphia gang, and Edith Dimock, an art student. When, after a honeymoon trip, the newlyweds returned to New York, they settled temporarily in a one-room studio in an uptown building where Henri, then abroad, had a studio. A few weeks later, Sloan, having at last quit Philadelphia, moved into Henri’s place with his Dolly. And that summer, to Shinn’s delight, the Glackenses found a studio apartment almost next door to him, at 3 Washington Square. Flossie and Edith, neighbors now, took to each other at once and in no time were intimates.

By then, the erstwhile Philadelphia newspaper artists had formed the habit of dining with their wives and New York friends at a Sixth Avenue restaurant called Mouquin’s, the setting of what may be Glackens’ best-known picture, Chez Mouquin (1905), but since Shinn was a teetotaler, he didn’t really enjoy these convivial evenings and attended only occasionally. Glackens was his main link with the others, and it was through him that he soon met Ernest Lawson, a mild, smiling painter of landscapes, who, with his wife, occupied a studio around the corner from them both, in MacDougal Alley. Shinn already knew two other unconventional painters whose work Henri admired and with whom he himself would soon be associated: the shy bachelor Maurice Prendergast of Boston, whose joyously polychrome, tapestrylike watercolors of women and children at the seaside and in city parks could lift the heaviest hearts, and Arthur B. Davies, who lived upstairs from the Macbeth Galleries and had arranged Henri’s first one man show there in 1902.

In the summer of 1906, as in summers past and to come, the Shinns and the Glackenses rented cottages on Great South Bay in Bellport, Long Island. That fall and winter, Shinn was so busy decorating fashionable houses in Connecticut and working up murals for Belasco’s theater that he gave little thought to the fate of the pictures he had routinely submitted to the National Academy of Design for possible exhibition. Not so Henri, now both an academician and a member of the selection jury; to his dismay, his fellow jurors, in considering paintings for the winter exhibition, turned down all of those by Shinn, Luks, and Glackens. And for the spring show they rejected, over his vociferous protests, every single picture submitted by Shinn, Luks, Glackens, Lawson, and Davies.

This was too much for Henri. Irate, he withdrew two of the three paintings of his own that had been approved for exhibition and soon began, with Sloan, Glackens, and others, to look into the possibility of mounting an independent show.

Before long, Davies informed Sloan that the Macbeth Galleries could be theirs for two weeks the following

winter, and since William Macbeth had long supported the more individual American painters, everyone found this solution appropriate. Asked by letter whether he wanted to take part, Prendergast replied from Boston that he was “for it strong.” And in mid-May, with the roster of participants complete, the story was given to the newspapers, which promptly took sides for and against the eight “apostles of ugliness” nine months in advance of their scheduled act of rebellion.

Of the eight pastels and oils that Shinn contributed to the epochal show of February 1908, six, including London Hippodrome, were explicitly theatrical—glimpses of ballet dancers, an acrobat, musicians in an orchestra—but the one that was sold, Girl in Blue, was not. The purchaser was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the socialite-sculptor and future founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who also bought three other pictures out of the show; a month later she was to acquire from Shinn four red-chalk drawings and a monotype. So even as it enabled him to combat the tyranny of academic taste, the exhibition brought him a tidy profit.

In April 1910, Shinn, along with every other member of The Eight except Luks, whose long-overdue first one man show conflicted with it, took part in a huge, successful 600-work Exhibition of the Independent Artists, open to all comers.

The following year, Shinn was commissioned to execute for the Trenton, New Jersey, city hall, two very large murals representing the city’s main industrial sites: a steel mill and a pottery works. He put in six months familiarizing himself with the workmen and their operations at the two plants before going to work on the huge panels. The rococo-revival style he ordinarily employed for murals would obviously have been inappropriate for the subjects in question, and his muscular, half-naked male figures toiling in the blazing light and heat of the steel furnace and kilns are relentlessly realistic.

Around this time Shinn, on impulse, built in the court behind 112 Waverly Place a complete little theater, containing seats for fifty-five spectators. He wrote burlesque melodramas, among them Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against Than Usual, in which Flossie Shinn played the title role of the village schoolmarm who, as the innocent victim of scandal, is driven out into a snowstorm by the farm couple (Shinn and Edith Glackens) with whom she lodged. Hazel is then pursued by the villainous Flugeon Smith (Glackens), who, failing to possess her by foul means, offers matrimony. At this point in the story, Shinn’s muse abruptly abandoned him, and at a rehearsal he invited Flossie to come up with her own retort. Glaring defiance at her loathed suitor, she instantly cried: “You vampire in viper’s form! Rather a thousand times would I be dead—with a snowdrift in my hair! That, sir, would be my bridal wreath!” On opening night this speech elicited a tumult of cheering and clapping.