William Glackens
1870–1938

Born in 1870 in Philadelphia, William Glackens began his career in art as a commercial illustrator, often working alongside his contemporaries George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn.  These artists would later study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Glackens’s friend, the painter Robert Henri, who taught his students to concentrate on the grittier aspects of urban life, using a dark palette and a painting technique consisting of swift, muscular strokes in an effort to make their art reflect the spontaneity of real life.  This technique met with criticism and even sneering derision by the established art world in New York.  In 1907 the National Academy of Design refused to include the work of Glackens and his peers in an important exhibition.  In response, eight artists, including Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan, arranged a group show at the MacBeth Gallery in 1908, which proved to be a seminal exhibition in establishing the careers of the participants, who came to be known as “The Eight” and later by one disapproving critic as “The Ashcan School.”