Modern Age
Robert Henri (1865–1929)
American Taos and Santa Fe Art Colonies painter.
Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865; the surname is sounded 'hen-rye') was the driving force of American realism at the turn of the twentieth century and the acknowledged leader of the ASHCAN SCHOOL. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy under Thomas Anshutz and then in Paris, he came back convinced that art should be made from the raw, immediate life around it rather than from studio convention. In 1908 he organized the exhibition of 'The Eight' as a protest against the conservative National Academy, gathering the painters who would be nicknamed the Ashcan School for their unsentimental scenes of New York streets, tenements, and working people.
Henri was, above all, one of the most influential American art teachers of his generation. From his classrooms in New York and his own school, he taught Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, and many others, and his teaching was distilled into 'The Art Spirit' (1923), compiled by his student Margery Ryerson, which remained a touchstone for artists for decades. He preached direct, rapid, feeling-led painting after the example of Frans Hals and Manet, and urged students to paint their own vivid response to life rather than a polished likeness.
From 1916 onward Henri spent long summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he abandoned his dark urban palette for brighter, higher-keyed color and produced a great gallery of portraits of Pueblo and Hispano New Mexicans and children, painting each as a dignified, living individual. It is this Southwest portrait work that places him in the Santa Fe room of the American Museum of Western Art - The Anschutz Collection in Denver, even though at heart he remained an Ashcan realist rather than a Taos or Santa Fe regionalist.
The words the record keeps using: vital, direct, bold, humane, spontaneous, forthright, warm.
At a glance
- Lived 1865–1929
- Origin American
- Worked in New York
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Taos and Santa Fe Art Colonies
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Oil sketch (modello)
Works in the archive
- Snow in New York, 1902 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A slushy, snow-choked New York side street recedes between dark buildings, a cart and a few muffled figures the only life in the grey weather. It is a defining early Ashcan picture: not a picturesque snowscape but the… - Salome, 1909 (The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota)
A full-length figure of a dancer costumed as the biblical Salome stares out with bold, theatrical directness. Painted with bravura speed, the picture was notorious in its day - too risque and unconventional for the… - Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)
The sculptor, collector, and future founder of the Whitney Museum reclines full-length on a couch in loose, modern trousers, relaxed and self-possessed. Commissioned by the sitter, the portrait catches a new kind of… - Indian Girl in White Blanket, 1917 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A young Pueblo woman, wrapped in a white blanket, gazes out with grave composure - one of the many portraits Henri painted during his Santa Fe summers from 1916 on. He approached his New Mexican sitters as vivid,…
What was said
Henri held that a work of art is not an end in itself but the expression of the artist's own living response to the world - the 'art spirit' - and he taught that the student's real task is to develop that individual response and put feeling and life into the picture rather than to make a merely correct one.
Henri urged painters to seize the vivid, fleeting life and gesture of a subject rather than to labor over a polished likeness, insisting that the sensation of the living moment is what the picture must carry.
Henri described seeking out sitters, across many communities and walks of life, in whom he recognized the dignity and distinct individuality of humanity - the people he called 'my people' - and painting them so that the viewer meets a real, living person.
Lineage
Learned from Thomas Eakins
What would Robert make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Robert Henri", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Robert · Keep a life moment the way Robert would · Pictures made after Robert