William Morris Hunt
William Morris Hunt, American painter, was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, to Jane Maria Hunt and Hon. Jonathan Hunt, who raised one of the preeminent families in American art. William Morris Hunt was the leading painter of Massachusetts. William Morris Hunt was born into prominence: Hunt's father's family, the Hunt family of Vermont, were among Vermont's founders and largest landowners. Hunt withdrew in his junior year. Having been denied the opportunity to paint and draw by an overbearing father, Jane Leavitt Hunt resolved that her children would be given the chance to study the arts in the best academies—even if it meant moving to Europe to attend them. Following the death of his Congressman father from cholera in 1832 at the age of 44, Hunt's mother Jane took him and his brothers to Switzerland, the South of France and to Rome, where Hunt studied with Couture in Paris, coming under the influence of Jean-François Millet after being inspired by Millet's The Sower at the 1851 Paris Salon; the Hunt family remained in Europe for a dozen years.
During part of that time, William Morris Hunt and his brother Richard Morris Hunt shared an apartment at 1 rue Jacob, close by the École des Beaux-Arts, where William studied painting under Thomas Couture. "From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work," writes historian David McCullough. "'Mr. William Hunt is our most promising artist here,' reported Thomas Appleton to his father." Hunt spent the next two years under the tutelage of Millet in Barbizon before his return to the states. The companionship of Millet had a lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, his work grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness, he was among the biggest proponents of the Barbizon school in America, he more than any other turned the rising generation of American painters towards Paris. About his influence, S. G. W. Benjamin wrote in a posthumous assessment of Hunt: To the late William M. Hunt that we must ascribe... the general impulse toward foreign styles now modifying the arts of design in this country....
The power of Mr. Hunt was... felt in directing a large number of young art-students to visit Paris, also Munich, at each of which the tendency has been for some years toward bolder methods in the technics of art. The result has been to introduce to a truer perception of the vital importance of style in the present stage of our art, to emphasize the truth that he who has anything to say will make it much more effective if he knows how to give it adequate utterance. After leaving Paris, Hunt painted and used his family connections to establish art schools in Newport, Rhode Island, Vermont, the Faial Island in the Azores, in Boston, where he became popular portrait painter. Before his lauded return to America in 1855, Hunt was married in Paris to Louise Dumaresq Perkins, daughter of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Jr. a Boston merchant and patron of the arts. Hunt was married to Ms. Perkins again upon his return to Boston in 1855 for legal reasons. Hunt was married for the second time in the influential King's Chapel in Boston by academic and clergyman Ephraim Peabody, shortly before Peabody's death in 1856.
On his return, Hunt painted some of his most handsome canvases, all reminiscent of his life in France and of Millet's influence. Such works include The Belated Kid, Girl at the Fountain, Hurdy-Gurdy Boy, others – but the public called for portraits, it became the fashion to sit for Hunt. Sadly, many of Hunt's paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Hunt owned many canvases by Millet, including Millet's The Sower, for which Millet somewhat unwillingly accepted a payment of $60 from Hunt. Among his works, American landscapes predominated. In the summer of 1878, the year before his death, Hunt painted a series of sweeping views of Niagara Falls, his works include the "Bathers: Twice Painted" and "The Allegories" for the Assembly Chamber of the State Capitol at Albany, New York, now lost due to disintegration of the stone panels on which they were painted.. His book, Talks about Art, was well received.
Nor did Hunt confine himself to oil painting. He was prolific, working as a sculptor as well. From 1850 to 1877, the Vermont native was Boston's leading landscape painter. Hunt is credited for having influenced the styles of Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam and John Joseph Enneking. Hunt's signature lively brushwork derived from study of contemporary European painting, marked a new phase in'oil sketching', carried on by Homer and others. Other friends and associates included artist Frank Hill Smith."The greatest of Boston painters", writes art historian G. W. Sheldon in his American Painters, "and one of the few great American painters, Mr. William Morris Hunt, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont." While a friend and student of Millet, "Hunt is an original artist, every picture of his is a spontaneous and independent product." In a bit of art history revisionism, some sch
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital and second-largest city of the most populous German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, as well as the seventh-largest city in Germany. With a population of 617,280. At the confluence of the Rhine and its tributary Düssel, the city lies in the centre of both the Rhine-Ruhr and the Rhineland Metropolitan Regions with the Cologne Bonn region to its south and the Ruhr to its north. Most of the city lies on the right bank of the Rhine; the city is the largest in the German Low Franconian dialect area. "Dorf" meaning "village" in German, the "-dorf" suffix is unusual in the German-speaking area for a settlement of Düsseldorf's size. Mercer's 2012 Quality of Living survey ranked Düsseldorf the sixth most livable city in the world. Düsseldorf Airport is Germany's third-busiest airport after those of Frankfurt and Munich, serving as the most important international airport for the inhabitants of the densely populated Ruhr, Germany's largest urban area. Düsseldorf is an international business and financial centre, renowned for its fashion and trade fairs, is headquarters to one Fortune Global 500 and two DAX companies.
Messe Düsseldorf organises nearly one fifth of premier trade shows. As second largest city of the Rhineland, Düsseldorf holds Rhenish Carnival celebrations every year in February/March, the Düsseldorf carnival celebrations being the third most popular in Germany after those held in Cologne and Mainz. There are 22 institutions of higher education in the city including the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, the university of applied sciences, the academy of arts, the university of music; the city is known for its pioneering influence on electronic/experimental music and its Japanese community. When the Roman Empire was strengthening its position throughout Europe, a few Germanic tribes clung on in marshy territory off the eastern banks of the Rhine. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the odd farming or fishing settlement could be found at the point where the small river Düssel flows into the Rhine, it was from such settlements. The first written mention of Düsseldorf dates back to 1135. Under Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa the small town of Kaiserswerth to the north of Düsseldorf became a well-fortified outpost, where soldiers kept a watchful eye on every movement on the Rhine.
Kaiserswerth became a suburb of Düsseldorf in 1929. In 1186, Düsseldorf came under the rule of the Counts of Berg. 14 August 1288 is one of the most important dates in the history of Düsseldorf. On this day the sovereign Count Adolf VIII of Berg granted the village on the banks of the Düssel town privileges. Before this, a bloody struggle for power had taken place between the Archbishop of Cologne and the count of Berg, culminating in the Battle of Worringen; the Archbishop of Cologne's forces were wiped out by the forces of the count of Berg who were supported by citizens and farmers of Cologne and Düsseldorf, paving the way for Düsseldorf's elevation to city status, commemorated today by a monument on the Burgplatz. The custom of turning cartwheels is credited to the children of Düsseldorf. There are variations of the origin of the cartwheeling children. Today the symbol represents the story and every year the Düsseldorfers celebrate by having a cartwheeling contest. After this battle the relationship between the four cities deteriorated, because they were commercial rivals.
Today, it finds its expression in a humorous form and in sports. A market square sprang up on the banks of the Rhine and the square was protected by city walls on all four sides. In 1380, the dukes of Berg moved their seat to the town and Düsseldorf was made regional capital of the Duchy of Berg. During the following centuries several famous landmarks were built, including the Collegiate Church of St Lambertus. In 1609, the ducal line of the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg died out, after a virulent struggle over succession, Jülich and Berg fell to the Wittelsbach Counts of Palatinate-Neuburg, who made Düsseldorf their main domicile after they inherited the Electorate of the Palatinate, in 1685, becoming now Prince-electors as Electors Palatine. Under the art-loving Johann Wilhelm II, a vast art gallery with a huge selection of paintings and sculptures, were housed in the Stadtschloss. After his death, the city fell on hard times again after Elector Charles Theodore inherited Bavaria and moved the electoral court to Munich.
With him he took the art collection. Destruction and poverty struck Düsseldorf after the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon made Düsseldorf its capital. Johann Devaranne, a leader of Solingen's resistance to Napoleon's conscription decrees, was executed here in 1813. After Napoleon's defeat, the whole Rhineland including Berg was given to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815; the Rhine Province's parliament was established in Düsseldorf. By the mid-19th century, Düsseldorf enjoyed a revival thanks to the Industrial Revolution as the city boasted 100,000 inhabitants by 1882.
Everett Shinn
Everett Shinn was an American realist painter and member of the Ashcan School. He exhibited with the short-lived group known as "The Eight," who protested the restrictive exhibition policies of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design, he is best known for his robust paintings of urban life in New York and London, a hallmark of Ashcan art, for his theater and residential murals and interior-design projects. His style varied over the years, from gritty and realistic to decorative and rococo. Shinn was born in New Jersey, a large Quaker-dominated community, his parents Isaiah Josephine Ransley Shinn were rural farmers. Their second son, he was named for the author Edward Everett Hale, of whom his father was a great fan. "Shinn's ability to draw was evident from early childhood." At age 15 he was enrolled at the Spring Garden Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied mechanical drawing. The following year he took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, by age 17 was working as a staff artist for the Philadelphia Press.
Moving to New York City in 1897, he was soon known as one of the more talented urban realists who were chronicling in paint the energy and class divisions of modern metropolitan life. In 1898 Shinn married Florence "Flossie" Scovel, another artist from New Jersey. By 1933 Shinn was the subject of many tabloid rumors. Though he exhibited less later in his life, Shinn had a well-established career by the 1920s but suffered serious financial losses during the Depression and sold few paintings during that time. Between 1937 and his death in 1953, Shinn received several awards for his innovative paintings and participated in a number of exhibitions, he died of lung cancer in New York City in 1953. Shinn was a model for the talented, promiscuous artist-protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's 1915 novel The "Genius". With his well-known taste for the good life, Shinn was dubbed by art historian Sam Hunter "the dandy of the realists." Most art historians, as well as Shinn himself, consider his employment by the Philadelphia Press the true beginning of his art career.
He was entering the field of newspaper illustration in its heyday, he was a draughtsman of great facility. Shinn moved from paper to paper for the rest of his illustrating career, receiving a larger salary with each move; the ability to convey animated movement and the attention to detail necessary for his newspaper illustrations is reflected in Shinn's paintings and pastels those treating urban themes. In 1899, he quit the newspaper business and began working for Ainslee's Magazine, a magazine that employed his wife, by that time a successful illustrator and who brought in a good deal of the household income, he illustrated for a wide range of popular journals over the next twenty years, including Harper's, Vanity Fair, Life and Judge. Shinn started displaying his paintings and pastels publicly in 1899 to mixed reactions. In 1900, he and Flossie traveled to Europe to allow him an opportunity to study other painters and to prepare to produce enough work for another exhibition; the trip influenced his art in years to come.
Shinn has said of his experience at the Philadelphia Press: "In the Art Department of the Philadelphia Press on wobbling, ink-stained drawing boards William J. Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and John Sloan went to school, a school now lamentably extinct…a school that trained memory and quick perception." It was during Shinn's time in Philadelphia that artists Robert Henri, John Sloan, Joseph Laub established the Charcoal Club as an informal alternative art school. The group, which included Henri, Sloan and fellow illustrators and would-be painters like William Glackens and George Luks, reached a peak membership of thirty-eight and sketched nudes and critiqued of each other's work; the club, both ribaldly social and intellectual, is thought of a point of origin for what became known as the Ashcan school of American art. To his friends and fellow artists, Henri urged the study of Whitman, Emerson and Ibsen and the need for painters to forge a new style of art that spoke more to their time and experience.
He believed that younger artists should look to the modern city for their subject matter and paint in a freer, less academic style than art lovers of the time were accustomed to. It was an outlook with which Shinn agreed. In 1897, Shinn was offered a higher paying job as an illustrator for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, he was joined shortly after by his wife, by other members of the Charcoal Club. Shinn enjoyed observing the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, his fascination with the intensity of urban life is evident in paintings like Fire on Mott Street and Fight or in his renderings of election rallies and matinee crowds. Shinn had a particular interest in scenes of street violence, his preferred medium at this time when not drawing for the newspaper was pastel, the medium least associated with the grittiness of his subject mat
Lewis Hine
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform, his photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States. Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saved his money for a college education, he studied sociology at the University of Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform. In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, leaving his teaching position.
Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits. Hine's work for the NCLC was dangerous; as a photographer, he was threatened with violence or death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but posed a serious threat to the industry. To gain entry to the mills and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of "work portraits," which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry.
In 1930, Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. In order to obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue. During the Great Depression Hine again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, he served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed; the last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage.
Hine hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, Hine lost his house and applied for welfare, he died on November 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old. After Hine's death, his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, dismantled in 1951; the Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures and did not accept them, but the George Eastman House did. In 2006, author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's historical fiction middle-grade novel, Counting on Grace was published by Wendy Lamb Books; the latter chapters center on 12-year-old Grace and her life-changing encounter with Hine, during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to have many child laborers. On the cover is the iconic photo of Grace's real-life counterpart, Addie Card, taken during Hine's undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill.
In 2016, Time published colorized versions of several of Hine's photographs of child labor in the US. Hine's work is held in the following public collections: Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County – five thousand NCLC photographs George Eastman House – nearly ten thousand photographs and negatives Library of Congress – over 5,000 photographs, including examples of Hine's child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, his WPA and TVA images. New York Public Library, New York Child Labor: Girls in Factory Breaker Boys Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills Steam Fitter Workers, Empire State Building House Calls, a documentary about physician and photographer Mark Nowaczynski, inspired by Hine to photograph elderly patients. Lewis Wickes Hine | University of Illinois Lewsin Hine photographs | Shorpy.com
Arthur Bowen Davies
Arthur Bowen Davies was an avant-garde American artist and influential advocate of modern art in the United States c. 1910–1928. Davies was born in the son of David and Phoebe Davies, he was keenly interested in drawing when he was young and, at fifteen, attended a large touring exhibition in his hometown of American landscape art, featuring works by George Inness and members of the Hudson River School. The show had a profound effect on him, he was impressed by Inness's tonalist landscapes. After his family relocated to Chicago, Davies studied at the Chicago Academy of Design from 1879 to 1882 and attended the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League, he worked as a magazine illustrator before devoting himself to painting. In 1892, Davies married one of New York State's first female physicians, her family, suspecting that their daughter might end by being the sole breadwinner of the family if she was to marry an impoverished artist, insisted that the bridegroom sign a prenuptial agreement, renouncing any claim on his wife's money in the event of divorce.
Appearances notwithstanding, they were anything but a conventional couple aside from the fact that Davies was of a philandering nature. Virginia had eloped when she was young and had murdered her husband on her honeymoon when she discovered that he was an abusive drug addict and compulsive gambler, a fact that she and her family kept from Davies. An urbane man with a formal demeanor, Arthur B. Davies was "famously diffident and retiring", he would invite anyone to his studio and in life, would go out of his way to avoid old friends and acquaintances. The reason for Davies' reticence became known after his sudden death while vacationing in Italy in 1928: he had two wives and children by each of them, a secret kept from Virginia for twenty-five years. With Virginia, he had two sons and Arthur. Within a year of his marriage, Davies' paintings began to sell but steadily. In turn-of-the-century America, he found a market for his gentle, expertly painted evocations of a fantasy world. Regular trips to Europe, where he immersed himself in Dutch art and came to love the work of Corot and Millet, helped him to hone his color sense and refine his brushwork.
By the time he was in his forties, Davies had definitively proved his in-laws wrong and, represented by a prestigious Manhattan art dealer, William Macbeth, was making a comfortable living. His reputation at the time, still today, rests on his ethereal figure paintings, the most famous of, Unicorns: Legend, Sea Calm in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1920s, his works commanded high prices and he was recognized as one of the most respected and financially successful American painters, he was prolific and skilled. Art history texts cited him as one of America's greatest artists. Important collectors like Duncan Phillips were eager to buy his latest drawings and oil paintings. Davies was the principal organizer of the legendary 1913 Armory Show and a member of The Eight, a group of painters who in 1908 mounted a protest against the restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design. Five members of the Eight—Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn —were Ashcan realists, while Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson painted in a different, less realistic style.
His friend Alfred Stieglitz, patron to many modern artists, regarded Davies as more broadly knowledgeable about contemporary art than anyone he knew. Davies served as an advisor to many wealthy New Yorkers who wanted guidance about making purchases for their art collections. Two of those collectors were Lizzie P. Bliss and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, two of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, whose Davies-guided collections became a core part of that museum. Davies was but remarkably generous in his support of fellow artists, he was a mentor to the gifted but troubled sculptor John Flannagan, whom he rescued from dire poverty and near-starvation. He helped finance Marsden Hartley's 1912 trip to Europe, which resulted in a major phase of Hartley's career, he recommended to his own dealer financially strapped artists whose talent he believed in, like Rockwell Kent. Yet Davies made enemies as well, his role in organizing the Armory Show, a massive display of modern art which proved somewhat threatening to American realists like Robert Henri, the leader of The Eight, showed a forceful side to his character that many in the art world had never seen.
With fellow artists Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, he devoted himself with great zeal to the project of scouring Europe for the best examples of Cubism and Futurism and publicizing the exhibition in New York and in Chicago and Boston. Those who did not support the venture or expressed any reservations, like his old colleague Henri, were treated with contempt. Davies knew in which direction the tide of art history was flowing and displayed little tolerance for those who could not keep pace. In an official statement for a pamphlet, sold at the Chicago venue of the Armory Show and reprinted in The Outlook magazine, Davies wrote: "In getting together the works of the European Moderns, the Society [i.e. the organizing body for the Armory Show, the Association of American Painter
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director, poet. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is referred to as "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time, his major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Pillars of Society, The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman. He is the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, by the early 20th century A Doll's House became the world's most performed play. Several of his dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind the façades, revealing much, disquieting to a number of his contemporaries, he had a critical eye and conducted a free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. His early poetic and cinematic play Peer Gynt, has strong surreal elements.
Ibsen is ranked as one of the most distinguished playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as "a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare", he is regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902, 1903, 1904. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, Ibsen shaped his dramas according to his family background, he was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen. Ibsen's dramas have a strong influence upon contemporary culture.
Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, into a well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien in Telemark county, a city, noted for shipping timber. As he wrote in an 1882 letter to critic and scholar Georg Brandes, "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", explaining that he was related with "just about all the patrician families who dominated the place and its surroundings", mentioning the families Paus, von der Lippe and Blom. Ibsen's grandfather, ship captain Henrich Ibsen, had died at sea in 1797, Knud Ibsen was raised on the estate of ship-owner Ole Paus, after his mother Johanne, née Plesner, remarried. Knud Ibsen's half-brothers included lawyer and politician Christian Cornelius Paus and ship-owner Christopher Blom Paus, lawyer Henrik Johan Paus, who grew up with Ibsen's mother in the Altenburg home and after whom Henrik Ibsen was named. Knud Ibsen's paternal ancestors were ship captains of Danish origin, but he decided to become a merchant, had some initial success.
His marriage to Marichen Altenburg, a daughter of ship-owner Johan Andreas Altenburg and Hedevig Christine Paus, was a successful match. Theodore Jorgenson points out that "Henrik's ancestry reached back into the important Telemark family of Paus both on the father's and on the mother's side. Hedvig Paus must have been well known to the young dramatist, for she lived until 1848." Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' "strange incestuous marriage," and would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably his masterpiece Rosmersholm. When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, his father's fortunes took a significant turn for the worse, the family was forced to sell the major Altenburg building in central Skien and move permanently to their small summer house, Venstøp, outside of the city. Henrik's sister Hedvig would write about their mother: "She was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, everything to her husband and children, she sacrificed herself time again.
There was no bitterness or reproach in her." The Ibsen family moved to a city house, owned by Knud Ibsen's half-brother, wealthy banker and ship-owner Christopher Blom Paus. His father's financial ruin would have a strong influence on Ibsen's work. Ibsen would both name characters in his plays after his own family. A central theme in Ibsen's plays is the portrayal of suffering women, echoing his mother Marichen Altenburg. At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school, he began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was 18, he had a liaison with Else Sophie Jensdatter Birkedalen which produced a son, Hans Jacob Hendrichsen Birkdalen, whose upbringing Ibsen paid for until the boy was fourteen, though Ibsen never saw Hans Jacob. Ibsen went to Christiania intending to matriculate at the university, he soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all
Jerome Myers
Jerome Myers was an American artist and writer associated with the Ashcan School known for his sympathetic depictions of the urban landscape and its people. He was one of the main organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to America. Born in Petersburg and raised in Philadelphia and Baltimore, he spent his adult life in New York City. Myers worked as an actor and scene painter, he studied art for a year at Cooper Union followed by study at the Art Students League over a period of eight years where his main teacher was George de Forest Brush. In 1896 he went to Paris, but only stayed a few months, believing that his main classroom was the streets of New York's Lower East Side, his strong interest and feelings for the new immigrants resulted in over a thousand drawings, as well as paintings and watercolors that depicted their lives outside of the tenements which were their first homes in America. In a 1923 magazine article he explained why cities were his greatest source of inspiration: All my life I had lived and played in the poorest streets of American cities.
I was one of them. Others saw ugliness and degradation there, I saw poetry and beauty, so I came back to them. I took a sporting chance of saying something out of my own experience and risking whether it was worthwhile or not; that is all any artist. Born in Petersburg, Jerome Myers was one of Abram and Julia Hillman Myers' five children, his brother, Gustavus Myers became a prominent muckraking journalist, socialist activist, historian. As their father was absent, the Myers children were raised by their mother and lived in Trenton, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From time to time, the siblings were placed in foster homes. Given these family hardships, Myers began taking odd jobs at a young age, living in Baltimore, before moving on to New York City. Arriving in Manhattan in 1886 at the age of nineteen, Myers worked for several years as a scene painter and for the Moss Engraving Company, where he reproduced photographic negatives. During this time he began attending evening art classes at the Art Students League.
His interest in urban subjects was evident. Myers' earliest oil painting, depicting a clotheslines silhouetted against distant tenements, is today thought to be one of the first paintings exemplifying Ashcan School subject matter in America. Around 1893, after sketching a canal boat during a day trip along the Morris and Essex Canal, Myers made his first sale to the woman who lived on the boat; the price was two dollars. In 1895, Myers found work in the art department of the New York Tribune. With savings of two hundred and fifty dollars from this job, he traveled to Paris in 1896. Upon his return to New York City, with only twenty dollars left, he rented, for seven dollars a month, a studio at 232 West 14th Street in a former five-story mansion, "equipped with a skylight and converted to the use of artists." There, his next door neighbor was Edward Adam Kramer, a painter just one year older than Myers himself. While Myers' art training had been limited to short stints at New York's Cooper Union and the Art Students League, Kramer had acquired his education in the European art centers of Munich and Paris.
It was Kramer. One day, when the art dealer William Macbeth arrived at Kramer's studio to view work, Kramer directed him to Myers' studio as well. Macbeth purchased two small paintings of his early New York street scenes from Myers on the spot, recommended that he bring additional work to the gallery. Macbeth thought of these two paintings and, taking them to his gallery, soon sold one to the banker, James Speyer; as an early critic for the New York Globe stated: "Myers' reputation dates from that purchase." Macbeth suggested that Myers relinquish drawing in pencil and pastel and turn to oils. In the years following 1902, Myers sold work through the Macbeth Gallery and exhibited in group shows at other venues. In March and April 1903, when the Colonial Club of New York held its annual art show, Exhibition of Paintings Mainly by New Men, among the twenty artists included were Robert Henri, John French Sloan, Myers, showing their works together for the first time. For Jerome Myers, summer in Manhattan provided particular opportunities for depicting immigrant life in the urban landscape.
The hot weather brought the tenement dwellers out into the parks of the city. By July 1906, Myers' reputation as an artist depicting the life of the people on the Lower East Side was such that a New York Times reporter was assigned to him, beginning at five o'clock one morning, to observe the artist capturing likenesses of the adults at work and children at play. To walk through the East Side with Myers, the reporter noted, "turning off here and there to glance at some particular house or group of people... to receive an impression of a joyous life lived in the open air for much the same reason as people live in that fashion in Europe—because their homes are not as comfortable as the streets." Individual responses to Myers' presence, were grounded in cultural differences. While the residents of Italian neighborhoods viewed the artist and his activities with excitement and curiosity, those of the Jewish Quarter, whose traditions forbade the production of representational images, protested by moving away from the artist's range of vision.
Myers won the Altman Prize for Street Shrine in 1931 and again in 1937 for City Playground. He was awarded the National Academy's Carnegie Prize in 1936 and
,_1919.jpg)
