1. Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher.
32 Facts About Robert Henri
1. 2.
In 1929 Robert Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York.
3.
Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Theresa Gatewood Cozad and John Jackson Cozad, a gambler and real estate developer.
4.
Robert Henri was a distant cousin of the painter Mary Cassatt.
5.
In 1871, Robert Henri's father founded the town of Cozaddale, Ohio.
6.
In October 1882, Robert Henri's father became embroiled in a dispute with a rancher, Alfred Pearson, over the right to pasture cattle on land claimed by the family.
7.
Robert Henri fled to Denver, Colorado, and the rest of the family followed shortly afterwards.
8.
In 1886, Robert Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, a protege of Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Hovenden, who was especially interested in anatomy.
9.
In Philadelphia, Robert Henri began to attract a group of followers who met in his studio to discuss art and culture, including several illustrators for the Philadelphia Press who would become known as the "Philadelphia Four": William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.
10.
Robert Henri believed that it was the right moment for American painters to seek out fresh, less genteel subjects in the modern American city.
11.
For several years, Robert Henri divided his time between Philadelphia and Paris, where he met the Canadian artist James Wilson Morrice.
12.
In 1898, Robert Henri married Linda Craige, a student from his private art class.
13.
The couple spent the next two years on an extended honeymoon in France, during which time Robert Henri prepared canvases to submit to the Salon.
14.
Robert Henri taught at the Veltin School for Girls beginning in 1900 and at the New York School of Art from 1902, where his students included Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper and his future wife Josephine Nivison, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Norman Raeben, Louis D Fancher, Stuart Davis and Carl Sprinchorn.
15.
Three years later, Robert Henri remarried; his new wife, Marjorie Organ, was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist for the New York Journal.
16.
In 1906, Robert Henri was elected to the National Academy of Design, but when painters in his circle were rejected for the academy's 1907 exhibition, he accused fellow jurors of bias and walked off the jury, resolving to organize a show of his own.
17.
In 1908, Robert Henri was one of the organizers of a landmark show entitled The Eight at the Macbeth Galleries in New York.
18.
Robert Henri was, by this point, at the heart of the group who argued for the depiction of urban life.
19.
In 1910, with the help of John Sloan and Walt Kuhn, Robert Henri organized the Exhibition of The Independent Artists, the first nonjuried, no-prize show in the US, which he modeled after the Salon des Independants in France.
20.
The relationship between Robert Henri and Sloan, both believers in Ashcan realism, was a close and productive one at this time; Kuhn would play a key role in the 1913 Armory Show.
21.
Robert Henri exhibited five paintings but, as a representational artist, he naturally understood that Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism implied a challenge to his style of picture-making.
22.
Robert Henri made several trips to Ireland's western coast and rented Corrymore House near Dooagh, a small village on Achill Island, in 1913.
23.
Robert Henri found that locale as inspirational as the countryside of Ireland had been.
24.
Robert Henri became an important figure in the Santa Fe art scene and persuaded the director of the state art museum to adopt an open-door exhibition policy.
25.
Robert Henri persuaded fellow artists George Bellows, Leon Kroll, John Sloan and Randall Davey to come to Santa Fe.
26.
Robert Henri was hospitalized at St Luke's Hospital in New York.
27.
Robert Henri's illness was not generally known, and came as a surprise in art circles.
28.
From 1915 to 1927, Robert Henri was a popular and influential teacher at the Art Students League of New York.
29.
Robert Henri was instrumental in promoting women to be artists.
30.
Robert Henri died of cancer that summer at the age of sixty-four.
31.
Robert Henri was eulogized by colleagues and former students and was honored with a memorial exhibition of seventy-eight paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
32.
Fittingly, among Robert Henri's most enduring works are his portraits of his fellow painters.