Introducing: The Ashcan School

The Ashcan School was an American realist movement active during the years leading up to the First World War. The group had formed out of an earlier association founded by Robert Henri known as ‘The Eight’. This included John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn and William J. Glackens, who had all become skilled at depicting bustling city life while working as illustrators for various Philadelphia newspapers. They used this ability to develop a style of ‘urban realism’ that captured the everyday life of ordinary working-class people. By 1904, all of The Eight had left Philadelphia for New York, and Henri was teaching a new generation of students that included George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Expanding membership meant that the Eight had morphed into the larger Ashcan School by around 1908, named after one of Bellows’s drawings entitled ‘Disappointments of the Ash Can’. Their style was marked by a rejection of both conservative academic convention and ‘genteel’ Impressionism. They drew on the dark tonalities and painterly brushwork of 17th century Spanish Realism in their attempt to create a distinctively American vision. By 1914, artistic fashions had shifted in a more avant-garde direction, but the group had laid rich foundations for later American figurative painting.