thumb|Self-portrait, 1890, oil on window shade, 14 x 11 7/8 inches, Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970. John Sloan was a leading member of the Ashcan School./" class="wiki">John French Sloan, Self-portrait, 1890, oil on window shade, 14 x 11 7/8 inches, Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970. John Sloan was a leading member of the Ashcan School.
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement is most associated with a group known as The Eight, whose members included five painters associated with the Ashcan school: William Glackens (1870-1938), Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953) and John French Sloan (1871-1951), along with Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). All five members of the Ashcan School studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Origin with The Eight

The Eight was a group of artists, many of whom had experience as newspaper illustrators in Philadelphia, who exhibited as a group only once, at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908. The show, which created a sensation, subsequently toured the US under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Eight are remembered as a group, despite the fact that their work was very diverse in terms of style and subject matter—only five of the artists (Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Shinn, and Luks) painted the gritty urban scenes that characterized the Ashcan School.

As noted, the Ashcan School was not an organized group. Their unity consisted of a desire to tell some truths about the dirty city. Robert Henri "wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter." The first known use of the "ash can" terminology in describing the movement was by Art Young, in 1916, but the term was applied later to a group of artists, including Henri, Glackens, Edward Hopper (a student of Henri), Shinn, Sloan, Luks, George Bellows (another student of Henri), Mabel Dwight, and others such as photographer Jacob Riis, who portrayed urban subject matter, also primarily of New York's working class neighborhoods. (Hopper's inclusion in the group [which he forswore] is ironic: his depictions of city streets are almost entirely free of the usual minutiae, with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.)

The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against the genteel American Impressionism that represented the vanguard of American art at the time. Their works, generally dark in tone, captured the spontaneous moments of life and often depicted such subjects as prostitutes, drunks, butchered pigs, overflowing tenements with laundry hanging on lines, boxing matches, and wrestlers. It was their frequent, although not total, focus upon poverty and the daily realities of urban life that prompted American critics to consider them the fringe of modern art.

Ashcan school gallery

Image:Snow in New York.jpg|Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Image:crossstreetsofnewyork.JPG|Everett Shinn, Cross Streets of New York, 1899, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
File:William Glackens - Italo-American Celebration, Washington Square.JPG|William Glackens, Italo-American Celebration, Washington Square, 1912, Boston Museum of Fine Arts
File:McSorley's Bar 1912 John Sloan.jpg|John French Sloan, McSorley's Bar, 1912, oil on canvas, 66.04 x 81.28 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts
File:George Luks - Houston Street.jpg|George Luks, Houston Street 1917, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum

See also

• American realism

• Realism (visual arts)