“I Have Soaked in Something to Paint”: John Sloan, New York City and Greenwich Village

New York has inspired many works of art, but no artist embraced the city more passionately than John Sloan—a Philadelphia newspaper illustrator turned painter who depicted New York at the dawn of the twentieth century, when immigrants crowded the Lower East Side, suffragists and socialists marched in the streets, and Greenwich Village was a center for the arts and dissent.

In the 150th anniversary of Sloan’s birth, join Manhattan borough historian and Rutgers professor emeritus Robert Snyder for a look at Sloan’s life and art in Greenwich Village as one of the leading figures of the “Ashcan School,” a loose collection of artists who depicted everyday life in early twentieth-century New York. Sloan and the Ashcan artists recorded everything from street life to popular culture to the relations between men and women. Participants will explore Sloan’s art, his urban vision, his political commitments, and the places where he lived and worked in Manhattan—above all, Greenwich Village.