John Sloan's NY-- then and now

As someone about as unfamiliar with NYC as it's possible to be, my goal for this Institute is to try to get a better understanding of the patterns of movement, circulation, and intersections among a group of late-19th & early-20c artists, illustrators, cartoonists, writers, and publishers whose interactions I'm attempting to reconstruct for my current book project.  They include some pretty well-known figures (R. F. Outcault, Abraham Cahan, Charles Dana Gibson, Stephen Crane), and some who were well-known in their day but since forgotten (Myra Kelly, Bruno Lessing/ Rudolph Block, George Luks), and some about whom I've been able to find little information at all (E. R. Lipsett and W. D. Stevens, to name two).One resource that I am hoping to use as a kind of "roadmap" for at least some of these interactions is the almost daily diary of one of this group's most interesting figures, the painter John Sloan, who was affiliated with the so-called Ashcan School led by Robert Henri and exhibited (as did many of the other Ashcan-ers) in the Armory Show of 1913. In his diaries, Sloan describes his day-to-day activities in painstaking detail: what he painted, what he sold, everyone he met with or talked to. It's one of the most complete documents we have of what it meant to be a professional artist in the United States during this period.As a follower of Henri, Sloan painted in a realistic style, and he painted many urban NYC scenes during his time here. The mapping impositions that Paul showed us today on Historypin are very much like the amazing then-and-now painting/photo comparisons on the John Sloan's New York website; here's one example that I stole from the site, images of a building we were talking about today, but 100 years apart. The website has several others, all worth checking out.

Sloan, along with his fellow painter friends Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn, met at the PA Academy of Fine Arts and began their careers working in Philadelphia newspapers as "artist-reporters." All of them ended up in NYC, where they worked as comic-supplement artists, illustrators for magazines and newspapers, and painted, focusing on scenes of urban life. Sloan went on to become the art editor of The Masses, where he worked closely with Max Eastman (and his wife Dolly served as business manager); later he taught for many years at the Art Students' League.Sloan's illustrations/drawings for The Masses (one of which I've already pinned), as well as his illustrations for popular magazines (including McClure's, The Saturday Evening Post, Munsey's, and Ainslee's) are a real contrast to the painting above, in that it shows a much more intimate look at New York people, rather than a landscape or architectural landmarks. Here's an illustration of a typical NY scene, from 1905:In reading his diaries, I've been a bit overwhelmed with the quantity and range of geographical references, so I am hoping to use the Historypin platform to, well, help pin down Sloan's peregrinations to begin with, and through his associations with other artists, editors, journalists, and writers, begin to trace the network of associations that held together a group of "culture workers" who until now have only been studied as individuals or within their respective cultural "fields" (painting, comics, illustration, journalism, fiction, editing). Looking forward to doing lots of walking, exploring, and taking pictures of my own & will pin what I find.