GLACKENS, WILLIAM (JAMES)

born March 13, 1870, Philadelphia died May 22, 1938, Westport, Conn., U.S. American artist, whose paintings of street scenes and middle-class urban life rejected 19th-century academic art and introduced a matter-of-fact realism into the art of the United States. Glackens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the same time worked as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Record, the Public Ledger, and The Press. In 1895 he spent a year in Paris and then settled in New York, where he worked as an illustrator for The New York Herald and the New York World. McClure's Magazine sent him to Cuba in 1898 to cover the Spanish-American War. At about the turn of the century he took up painting seriously. Hammerstein's Roof Garden (1901), a cabaret scene, was his first important picture. He joined a group of artists who were also interested in depicting contemporary life. Robert Henri was the leader of this group, which included John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn as well as the more Romantic painters Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Arthur B. Davies. Known as The Eight, they held one memorable exhibition in 1908, but, because of diversity of viewpoints, they disbanded. Among Glackens' major early paintings, Chez Mouquin (1905) shows a gay New York restaurant in a vivid and robust manner. Later, he became interested in Impressionism and was particularly influenced by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.