Artist Quotation
"Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth."—Robert Henri
The charismatic Henri (pictured below), who had trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, believed art should embody the spirit of its own time. He urged his students to go into the streets to capture the spontaneity and character of the people they encountered. In his own work—whether of elegant New Yorkers or the Irish children and Spanish gypsies he painted on annual trips abroad—he said he tried to portray "this thing that I call dignity in a human being."
To learn more about New York's Ashcan artists, visit our online exhibition, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. If you want more details and more art reproductions, then consider buying the catalogue in our online shop!
Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1996) at http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/metlives/index.html.
Pictured top: Robert Henri, 1865–1929, Blind Spanish Singer, 1912, oil, 41 x 33 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. J.H. Smith.
Pictured bottom: Portrait of Robert Henri, 1865–1929, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley and Son Collection.
"Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth."—Robert Henri
The charismatic Henri (pictured below), who had trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, believed art should embody the spirit of its own time. He urged his students to go into the streets to capture the spontaneity and character of the people they encountered. In his own work—whether of elegant New Yorkers or the Irish children and Spanish gypsies he painted on annual trips abroad—he said he tried to portray "this thing that I call dignity in a human being."