(American, 1865-1929) Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 24, 1865. In 1886, Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, Thomas Hovenden, and James B. Kelly. In 1888, he went to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. During the summers, he painted in Brittany and Barbizon, also visiting Italy before being admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1891. He returned to Philadelphia later that year and resumed studying at the academy. Henri initiated his long and influential career as an art teacher at the School of Design for Women, where he taught until 1895. During this period, he met a group of young Philadelphia newspaper illustrators who, with Henri’s encouragement, would pursue painting careers in New York: John Sloan (American, 1871 - 1951), William Glackens (American, 1870 - 1938), George Luks (American, 1866 - 1933), and Everett Shinn (American, 1873 - 1953). He also made regular trips to Paris, where he was particularly influenced by the works of Edouard Manet (French, 1832 - 1883), Frans Hals (Dutch, c. 1582/1583 - 1666), and Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599 - 1660). In 1898, one of his paintings was purchased for the Musée Nationale du Luxembourg.
In 1900, Henri settled in New York. He taught at the New York School of Art (formerly the Chase School) from 1902 to 1908. He rejected both the genteel tradition of academic painting and impressionism, instead creating unconventional urban realist subjects executed in a bold, painterly style. Around 1902, he began to specialize in portraiture. In 1906, Henri was elected to the National Academy of Design, and that summer, he taught in Spain. When the academy jury rejected works by Henri’s friends and colleagues—Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—for its 1907 annual show, he resolved to organize an independent exhibition. The result was the famous show of The Eight, held at Macbeth Gallery in February 1908. In 1910, Henri organized the first Exhibition of Independent Artists, an egalitarian group modeled after the Salon des Independents in Paris and operating under the principle, “no jury, no prizes.” Henri’s influence began to wane with the gradual ascent of more radical modernist styles after the 1913 Armory Show. Nevertheless, he continued to win numerous awards and taught at the Art Students League from 1915 until a year before his death from cancer on July 12, 1929.
Although Henri was an important portraitist and figure painter admired for his straightforward, vital likenesses of unusual sitters, he is best remembered today as the influential, progressive, and charismatic founder of the so-called Ashcan school of urban realism. A champion of “art for life’s sake,” he was noted for his democratic approach to portraiture, choosing sitters from diverse racial groups and walks of life. In 1909, he was strongly influenced by the color theories of Hardesty Maratta, and his palette brightened considerably. Henri was a tremendously influential teacher, and his ideas on art were collected by former pupil Margery Ryerson and published as The Art Spirit (Philadelphia, 1923).