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As I walked the streets with my portfolio of samples, going from one publisher to another, I saw the life of the city really for the first time. All those years on the newspapers [in Philadelphia], I had worked most of the day and evening. I had neither time nor reason to see the neighborhood life of the city. Coming to New York and finding a place to live where I could observe the backyards and rooftops behind our attic studio—it was a new and exciting experience. Work on the de Kock illustrations [a series of illustrations for a deluxe edition of fifty novels by the French author Paul de Kock], although of a completely different place and period, had fired my creative imagination and had increased the technical skill in handling the etching needle. … New York had its human comedy and I felt like making pictures of this everyday world. At first I had some idea of social commentary based on Hogarth’s morality series or Daumier’s dramatis personae. But I found that this was not the kind of motivation which was most valid for my own personality and talent. … I saw neighborhoods of the city, and saw the kind of people who lived, worked and played in the Chelsea district, the Tenderloin around Sixth Avenue, then Fifth Avenue, the parks, etc. On the whole, when finding incidents that provided ideas for paintings, I was selecting bits of joy in human life. [1]
The New York City Life series included thirteen etchings in all. Sloan completed the first ten between 1905 and 1906 and added three more between 1910 and 1911. As a set, they demonstrate Sloan’s ability to narrate anecdotal aspects of urban life. Night Windows, from 1910, depicts just the sort of scene Sloan might have observed from his apartment window. Sloan’s habit of peering into private homes in order to gather material for his paintings and etchings suggests a rather unseemly voyeuristic tendency. Here, with a clear sense of irony, he satirizes the practice of voyeurism. The print depicts apartment buildings at night, the darkness suggested by emphatic cross-hatching. The perspective suggests that the artist—and the viewer—are high up, perhaps in the apartment across the way. At left, a housewife leans out of her window to tend to the laundry hanging on the line. Behind her stands a child whose face is contorted as if he is wailing. Above them, the shadowy figure of a man is perched on the roof. Smokestacks, chimneys, and the facades of taller buildings surround him. His back is to us, and he leans slightly to the right. His position directly above the mother and child suggests that he, too, is an occupant of their apartment. Perhaps he has fled to the roof in order to escape the din or to smoke. Regardless, his attention has been attracted by yet another figure, a buxom woman dressed only in a nightgown, who occupies an apartment in another building. As she gazes out at the night and raises her hands to her hair, her sensuous form is outlined by the brightly-lit window. The man leans intently in her direction. Without even being able to see his face, the viewer knows that he is gazing at the other woman. Is Sloan poking fun at the Peeping Tom, or perhaps wryly acknowledging that he, too, is guilty of observing attractive women through night windows? He leaves that judgment up to the viewer.
Sloan wrote in his diary on December 12, 1910, “I started a new etched plate after dinner. The subject. … is one which I have had in mind—night, the roofs back of us—a girl in dishabille at a window and a man on the roof smoking his pipe and taking in the charms while at a window below him his wife is busy hanging out his washed linen.” [2]
Notes:
[1] John Sloan, quoted in Helen Farr Sloan, ed. John Sloan: New York Etchings (1905–1949) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1978), vii–viii.
[2] Sloan, quoted in Sloan, John Sloan, 18.
ProvenanceFrom 1976
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse in 1976 [1]
Notes:
[1] Reynolda House Annual Report, 1976-1977. See also memorandum of ownership by B. Millhouse, c. 1983, object file.
Exhibition History1976
Twentieth Century American Print Collection opening
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (12/3/1976)
2018
John Sloan: New York Etchings
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (6/12/2018-11/25/2018)
Published ReferencesReynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 142, 143
DepartmentAmerican Art
Night Windows
Artist
John Sloan
(1871 - 1951)
Date1910
Mediumetching
DimensionsFrame: 16 1/4 x 18 in. (41.3 x 45.7 cm)
Image (plate): 5 1/4 x 7 in. (13.3 x 17.8 cm)
SignedJohn Sloan
Credit LineGift of Barbara B. Millhouse
Copyright© 2021 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object number1976.2.2
DescriptionIn 1904, John Sloan married Anna “Dolly” Wall and the couple moved from Philadelphia to New York, settling in Chelsea. The neighborhood had a shabby bohemian quality that appealed to them. According to Sloan’s second wife, Helen Farr Sloan, the artist first conceived of the etching series called New York City Life as he pounded the pavement in search of illustration work in Manhattan. The artist later recalled:As I walked the streets with my portfolio of samples, going from one publisher to another, I saw the life of the city really for the first time. All those years on the newspapers [in Philadelphia], I had worked most of the day and evening. I had neither time nor reason to see the neighborhood life of the city. Coming to New York and finding a place to live where I could observe the backyards and rooftops behind our attic studio—it was a new and exciting experience. Work on the de Kock illustrations [a series of illustrations for a deluxe edition of fifty novels by the French author Paul de Kock], although of a completely different place and period, had fired my creative imagination and had increased the technical skill in handling the etching needle. … New York had its human comedy and I felt like making pictures of this everyday world. At first I had some idea of social commentary based on Hogarth’s morality series or Daumier’s dramatis personae. But I found that this was not the kind of motivation which was most valid for my own personality and talent. … I saw neighborhoods of the city, and saw the kind of people who lived, worked and played in the Chelsea district, the Tenderloin around Sixth Avenue, then Fifth Avenue, the parks, etc. On the whole, when finding incidents that provided ideas for paintings, I was selecting bits of joy in human life. [1]
The New York City Life series included thirteen etchings in all. Sloan completed the first ten between 1905 and 1906 and added three more between 1910 and 1911. As a set, they demonstrate Sloan’s ability to narrate anecdotal aspects of urban life. Night Windows, from 1910, depicts just the sort of scene Sloan might have observed from his apartment window. Sloan’s habit of peering into private homes in order to gather material for his paintings and etchings suggests a rather unseemly voyeuristic tendency. Here, with a clear sense of irony, he satirizes the practice of voyeurism. The print depicts apartment buildings at night, the darkness suggested by emphatic cross-hatching. The perspective suggests that the artist—and the viewer—are high up, perhaps in the apartment across the way. At left, a housewife leans out of her window to tend to the laundry hanging on the line. Behind her stands a child whose face is contorted as if he is wailing. Above them, the shadowy figure of a man is perched on the roof. Smokestacks, chimneys, and the facades of taller buildings surround him. His back is to us, and he leans slightly to the right. His position directly above the mother and child suggests that he, too, is an occupant of their apartment. Perhaps he has fled to the roof in order to escape the din or to smoke. Regardless, his attention has been attracted by yet another figure, a buxom woman dressed only in a nightgown, who occupies an apartment in another building. As she gazes out at the night and raises her hands to her hair, her sensuous form is outlined by the brightly-lit window. The man leans intently in her direction. Without even being able to see his face, the viewer knows that he is gazing at the other woman. Is Sloan poking fun at the Peeping Tom, or perhaps wryly acknowledging that he, too, is guilty of observing attractive women through night windows? He leaves that judgment up to the viewer.
Sloan wrote in his diary on December 12, 1910, “I started a new etched plate after dinner. The subject. … is one which I have had in mind—night, the roofs back of us—a girl in dishabille at a window and a man on the roof smoking his pipe and taking in the charms while at a window below him his wife is busy hanging out his washed linen.” [2]
Notes:
[1] John Sloan, quoted in Helen Farr Sloan, ed. John Sloan: New York Etchings (1905–1949) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1978), vii–viii.
[2] Sloan, quoted in Sloan, John Sloan, 18.
ProvenanceFrom 1976
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse in 1976 [1]
Notes:
[1] Reynolda House Annual Report, 1976-1977. See also memorandum of ownership by B. Millhouse, c. 1983, object file.
Exhibition History1976
Twentieth Century American Print Collection opening
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (12/3/1976)
2018
John Sloan: New York Etchings
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (6/12/2018-11/25/2018)
Published ReferencesReynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 142, 143
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