25 Facts About Everett Shinn

Everett Shinn was an American painter and member of the urban realist Ashcan School.

Everett Shinn is best known for scenes of disaster or street violence, as well as theatrical subjects, regarding the theatre as a place of satisfying illusion.

Everett Shinn was the only Ashcan artist who preferred to work in pastels.

Everett Shinn was reportedly a model for the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's novel The "Genius".

Everett Shinn was born in Woodstown, New Jersey, a Quaker-dominated community.

In 1898 Everett Shinn married Florence "Flossie" Scovel, another artist from New Jersey; in 1912 they divorced, and in 1913 he married Corinne Baldwin, going on to have two children, Janet and David.

Everett Shinn died of lung cancer in New York City in 1953.

Everett Shinn was reportedly a model for the talented, promiscuous artist-protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's 1915 novel The "Genius".

Everett Shinn was entering the field of newspaper illustration in its heyday, and he was a draughtsman of great facility.

Everett Shinn ultimately illustrated for a wide range of popular journals over the next twenty years, including Harper's, Vanity Fair, Life, Look, and Judge.

Everett Shinn started displaying his paintings and pastels publicly in 1899 to mixed reactions.

Everett Shinn has said of his experience at the Philadelphia Press:.

Everett Shinn 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.

In 1897, Everett Shinn was offered a higher paying job as an illustrator for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

Everett Shinn enjoyed living in the city and observing the hustle and bustle of Manhattan.

Everett Shinn had a particular interest in scenes of drama and street violence.

Everett Shinn's preferred medium at this time when not drawing for the newspaper was pastel, the medium least associated with the grittiness of his subject matter.

Everett Shinn is the only Ashcan artist to produce a large body of work in pastel.

Everett Shinn left no record or notes of any kind about his time in Europe, but it is generally assumed that he saw the work of Daumier, Degas, and Lautrec while in France and Walter Sickert while in England.

Everett Shinn became friendly with a number of major theater professionals in New York, including playwright Clyde Fitch, actress Julia Marlowe, and producer David Belasco.

Everett Shinn's most lasting contribution in this area, recently restored, are the murals he painted for Belasco's Stuyvesant Theatre, which opened in 1907 and is still a prominent Broadway playhouse.

In February 1908, Everett Shinn exhibited in a legendary exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York that was intended as a protest against the conservative tastes and restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful National Academy of Design.

Unlike the other members of The Eight, Everett Shinn did not exhibit in the famous 1913 Armory Show of modern art and, in fact, became over the years a confirmed anti-Modernist, expressing nothing but disdain for Picasso and Matisse.

Everett Shinn remained a representational artist all his life with no interest in stylistic experimentation, and throughout the 1910s and 1920s he cultivated a market for deftly-made drawings in the spirit of a latter-day Watteau or Boucher.

Yet Everett Shinn had never claimed for himself a political stance in his art or intended to narrow his interests in service to a movement or school of art.