Sloan's Circle
By the time the Sloans moved to New York in 1904, a community of Philadelphia artists had already relocated, including George Luks, William Glackens, Everett and Florence Scovel Shinn, James Preston, and Robert Henri and his wife Linda. Their presence helped to ease the Sloans' transition into the city. Glackens and Sloan had known each other since high school and Luks, Shinn, and Glackens had worked as newspaper illustrators together in Philadelphia. Within months the Sloans added new friends to their circle, such as Frank Crane (who married Luks's first wife), the artists Jerome and Ethel Myers, and the uptown Manhattan painter Ernest Lawson.
William Glackens, c. 1895.
Copy of the Declaration of Independence of the Greenwich Republic, January 23, 1917.
Arch Conspirators, 1917.
Helen at the Easel, 1947.
At Mouquin's, a restaurant on Twenty-eighth Street, the Sloans met Dublin-born Charles FitzGerald and Frederick James Gregg, art reviewers for the New York Sun, who would become advocates for Sloan, Henri, and their circle. The owner of the Café Francis, Jim Moore (grandson of Clement Moore, who wrote of "A Visit From Saint Nicholas") lived in the Sloans' neighborhood and became a friend of theirs. Moore threw raucous parties in the basement of his house, which he called the "Secret Lair Beyond the Moat." He hung his walls with blank canvasses in case any of his artistic friends felt inspired to leave him a masterpiece. The Sloans' upstairs neighbor and friend was the cartoonist and illustrator Rollin Kirby. Organizing exhibitions further expanded Sloan's circle to include Arthur B. Davies and Maurice Prendergast, Walter Pach, and Walt Kuhn.
One evening while out to dinner with the Henris, the Sloans met the Irish writer and artist John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), father of the poet. An avid urban walker, Yeats and Sloan became fast friends as they explored the city's streets together. Sloan would name Yeats and Henri the two greatest influences on his adult life. Another friend from this time, the literary critic and cultural historian Van Wyck Brooks was also a member of the Yeats-Sloan circle.
The Sloans moved to Greenwich Village in 1912, and their circle shifted to include a variety of local celebrities, as well as intellectual and political figures of the community. In his paintings and etchings, Sloan captured Village tavern owner Romany Marie Marchand, anarchist Hippolyte Havel, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and Gertrude Drick, the "flamboyant Village poet" who preferred to be called "Woe," so as to be able to introduce herself by saying, "Woe is me." Marcel Duchamp and Woe were among the group who celebrated atop the Washington Square Arch and declared independence for the Greenwich Republic on January 23, 1917. Duchamp and Sloan were among the founding members of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917.
In Greenwich Village, Sloan also found both a dealer and a key patron. In January of 1916 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force hosted Sloan's first one-man exhibition in Whitney's Greenwich Village studio. That same year, Kraushaar Galleries agreed to represent John Sloan, an arrangement that would last to the end of Sloan's life.
In 1927, a young New York woman, Helen Farr, began studying with Sloan at the Art Students League. Her habit of taking detailed notes of Sloan's lectures and comments would, in the 1930s, become a source for Sloan's 1939 publication, Gist of Art. Helen remained close with the Sloans, and after Dolly's death John Sloan married Helen Farr.