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1865 - 1929 • American • Painter • Realist
"The subject can be as it may, beautiful or ugly. The beauty of a work of art is in the work itself." - Robert Henri
Because his father, John Jackson Cozad, was a riverboat gambler who killed a man and became a fugitive from justice, the family name was changed and the son became known as Robert Earl Henri. He trained in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the influence of EAKINS, who had just recently been fired, was still strong (and whose painting the Gross Clinic Henri called the most wonderful painting he had ever seen). His teacher at the academy was ANSHUTZ. Henri also had ACADEMIC training in Paris, where he took note of IMPRESSIONISM, but he was even more impressed by the old masters HALS, VELAZQUEZ, and GOYA. Ultimately, while he retained the "slashing" brushstroke and dark tones, it was his subject matter and ideas that signified most and prevailed. Henri was the center, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City, of the renegade and Socialist artists of The EIGHT and the ASHCAN SCHOOL. SLOAN, GLACKENS, LUKS, and SHINN followed him from Philadelphia to New York. It was Henri who, as a juror, dramatically resigned when his friends' paintings were slighted for an exhibit at the National Academy of Design. The life of the city was Henri's subject, and he embraced it, embracing also, in portraits, the vitality of its new immigrant population. The rapid, coarse energy of his work matched the bold energy he saw in their faces and in the street scenes he recorded. Henri taught first, along with CHASE, at the New York School of Art (which Chase founded), and after 1909 at a school he started himself on upper Broadway. He was an inspiring teacher -BELLOWS, HOPPER, MACDONALDWRIGHT, and Stuart DAVIS were among his students. In 1910 Henri organized an exhibition in which some 200 artists joined The Eight, and their works were democratically hung in alphabetical order. Crowds thronged to the show, and police were summoned when a riot seemed imminent.