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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2021
During the period in which Theodore Dreiser wrote his first five novels, Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius,” the novelist indicated a particularly strong interest in those American painters who interpreted the city scene. And it was the so-called New York Realists—Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—who made the greatest appeal to him from approximately 1899 to 1915. Several reasons may be suggested for Dreiser's sympathy for this particular group of painters. First, the newspaper and magazine careers of the artists, with the exception of Henri, closely paralleled Dreiser's own career; and both Dreiser and the graphic artists eventually utilized this common background for their more ambitious work as novelist and as painter. Second, with Henri leading the attack, the group of painters emerged as the most aggressive force in the artistic revolt against the domination of the tradition-bound National Academy when they became known as the notorious “Ash-Can school” and “apostles of ugliness” soon after the turn of the century. Dreiser, of course, served a similar function in his challenge to the Genteel Tradition, the literary equivalent of the Academy in the United States. Third, the Ash-Can painters not only believed, as Dreiser did, that an artist must be an honest and truthful recorder and interpreter of the life he saw and knew, but it was in their depiction of these “truths” of city life, its violence and brutality and its beauty, that their relationship to Dreiser is most clearly seen.
1 The significance of Dreiser's relationship to these and other artists is discussed in greater detail in my article, “Dreiser and the Graphic Artist,” American Quarterly, m (Summer 1951), 127-141.
2 Broadway Magazine, xvii (March 1907), 589, 736.
3 Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York, 1923), p. 199.
4 This copy of The “Genius,” annotated by Shinn during August 1947, is the World Publishing Co. edition (Cleveland, 1946). All references to Mr. Shinn's annotations in my text or notes and to Dreiser's text will be to this edition. I wish here to acknowledge my indebtedness and gratitude to Mr. Shinn, whose wholehearted cooperation made this study possible.
5 Shinn's comic illustrations for Truth were slight endeavors which served no more purpose than to give point to the humorous caption. As far as I could ascertain in checking the files, they appeared only in Vols. 17 and 18 for 1898. But it is interesting to note that on the opposite page of an illustration by Shinn for Vol. 17 (26 Sept. 1898) there appeared an article by Dreiser, “The Haunts of Hawthorne”; and Vol. 18 of Truth ran a series of articles by Dreiser on painters.
6 Shinn to Kwiat, 7 Sept. 1948. Dreiser himself confirmed the use of Shinn as a prototype; see Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York, 1949), p. 328, n. 12.
7 Dreiser had also had connections with the World several years earlier.
8 Furthermore, the nature of the relationship between a magazine editor and his contributors probably threw Dreiser and Shinn together even more intimately than the artist suggests in his previously cited letter.
9 The other three artists were Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies.
10 Commenting upon the impact of the “Eight” in 1908, Oliver Larkin writes: “What shocked the world of art was a preoccupation with types, localities, and incidents to which Americans were conveniently deaf and blind. A degree of strenuousness could be forgiven in the days of Teddy Roosevelt; but to paint drunks and slatterns, pushcart peddlers and coal mines, bedrooms and barrooms was somehow to be classed among the socialists, anarchists, and other disturbers of the prosperous equilibrium.” Art and Life in America (New York, 1949), p. 336.
11 He also indicates some personal differences. Witla, during his early days in Chicago, neither drinks nor smokes; Shinn says that he smoked but did not drink (The “Genius,” annotated copy, p. 72). Witla is described as “big”; Shinn's comment: “I was never big” (p. 78).
12 Ibid., p. 187. It is interesting to note that Shinn began to use his studio as a little theater about 1912, producing his burlesques as good-natured slaps at the insipid dramas then appearing in Broadway theaters. This was, as Albert Parry points out, the first Little Theater in Greenwich Village, “even though Shinn did not suspect the import of his fun.” Garrets and Pretenders (New York, 1933), p. 277.
13 The following passage in the novel is the one which caught Shinn's eye: “ ‘A plan! A plan!’ said his instructor, making a peculiar motion with his hands which described the outline of the pose in a single motion. ‘Get your general lines first. Then you can put in the details afterward’ ” (p. 69).
14 Note that this person's name is identical with that of Dreiser's character. See also p. 174.
15 Shinn specifies, however, that he worked for Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazaar but never for Harper's Monthly.
16 Shinn comments directly on this passage: “Nor had I any respect for the National Academy, a sepulcher with a smell of the embalmed. Its opening receptions held the quiet hush of funereal respect. Not that the Academicians felt the chill of their artistic arteries but that social poise and quiet low-voiced discourse made its appeal to the diamond splashed chatelaines of private art galleries who felt in the sight of a well trimmed Van Dyke beard a metamorphosis of that great painter and a murmuring lion in their drawing rooms.”
17 An anecdote in this MS. illustrates Shinn's artistic attitude. He states that at one time he was commissioned by an art dealer to paint a picture of a rich client's home, one built in the medieval French style. “On my first visit to make my sketch I was disturbed by the lack of pictorial interest. . . . Here . . . there was no rain to dazzle the surface in reflections, no snow to track down and weave with traffic lanes, no leaves to drift across the street from the park trees to lay down islands of color.” Working in midsummer, and coming to grips with the problem before him, Shinn recalls: “To ‘turn in a thing of beauty’ I set about making what I believed was my idea of beauty. Lavishly I applied the snow, sifting the slanting roofs and chimneys . . . laying it on window sills and knobby ornament. A bus careened in its uneven weight of passengers and scudded close to a hansom cab. Plodding folk spotted the foreground, others in swishing skirts and buttoned coats wavering insecure in their footing in the shadow of floundering horses. A dog leaped a drift to gain a path where a bent figure toiled half hidden in a drift.” The activity, human and otherwise, engendered by snow and rain contributed in Shinn's estimation to a picture's “pictorial interest” and his “idea of beauty.” It may not be an anticlimax to note that Shinn's aesthetics was not shared by his agent. The painting was indignantly rejected for being an incongruous depiction of a wealthy man's home.
18 Page 219, insert. See Howells' reference to Shinn in his letter to his daughter Mildred, 5 March 1900: “Mamma says I must tell you something of the young artist, Everett Shinn, who came this morning to make an appointment to pastel me. ... He is the most unaffected charming boy I've seen in a long time; has an exhibition at Bussod and Voladen's [sicl: ‘Of course, I can't sell anything so queer, but the papers have treated me well’.” Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (New York, 1928), ii, 127. Shinn's relationship to Howells will be developed in a forthcoming article.
19 This picture offers an interesting parallel to Dreiser's description of the Fleischman bread line which Hurstwood knows so intimately toward the end of his tragic career in Sister Carrie.
20 Page 114. A painting with a similar title, “Six O'Clock, Winter,” was made by John Sloan in 1912. The “Genius” was being written at this time, and it is possible that Dreiser had Sloan's painting in mind.
21 Pages 112 and 174. Dreiser adds another description of the Greeley Square picture: “Eugene by some mystery of his art had caught the exact texture of seeping water on gray stones in the glare of various electric lights. He had caught the values of various kinds of lights, those in cabs, those in cable cars, those in shop windows, those in the street lamp—relieving by them the black shadows of the crowds and of the sky” (p. 228).
22 Shinn's pastel drawings were exhibited at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Company after the turn of the century. The catalogue for the exhibition from 9 to 21 March 1903, for example, advertised pastels of “New York and Paris types.” The painting, “Fifth Avenue at 34th Street,” here reproduced by permission of M. Knoedler & Company, portrays the former Knoedler shop on the right (it is now the corner on which Altman's is built).
23 Note that Shinn, like Witla, used the originals of his magazine work as a means for exhibiting his pictures. Shinn also believed that this phase of his career was to be considered seriously for its artistic merits.
24 Page 237. The anonymous art critic for Town Topics attacked the “Eight” Show in this vein in 1908: “Does it represent a new school, or even superior work on old lines? Bosh! It is technique . . . and as an offset poor drawing and an unhealthy, nay even coarse and vulgar point of view. Vulgarity smites one in the face at this exhibition, and I defy you to find anyone in a healthy frame of mind.... Is it true art to exhibit our sores? ... Bah! The whole thing creates a distinct feeling of nausea.”
25 Pages 237-238. Giles Edgerton wrote a sympathetic interpretation of the “Eight” Show for the Craftsman in 1908: “If they [The ‘Eight‘] will talk about their work at all, any one of them will tell you that just now there is no civilization in the world comparable in interest to ours; none so meteoric, so voluble, so turbulent, so unexpected, so instinct with life, so swift of change, so full of riotous contrast in light or shade. We have vivacity and bleakness, subtle reserve and brutal frankness, gorgeous color and pathetic dreariness. . . . We are enthusiastic and fickle, and we are just beginning to understand our power, our beauty and our blunders and the fact that we have just as good a right to regard ourselves as a source of inspiration as of revenue only.” The Craftsman, it will be recalled, was referred to as the Crafts in The “Genius.”