Join the Carnival!

Who hasn't thought of running away and joining the carnival? John Sloan surely did!

Enjoy this portrait of John Sloan, from the museum's Peter A. Juley & Son Collection as well as Sloan's painting, Travelling Carnival, Santa Fe, shown below.

In 1888, having grown up in Philadelphia, Sloan had to leave high school in his senior year when his father's business failed. He took a job as a cashier with a book and print dealer and found he was able to sell the greeting cards and copies of etchings by Rembrandt and Dürer that he had made. . . .

Sloan began his career as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, a profession that had attracted other future Ashcan painters then living in Philadelphia. When they—Henri, Luks, Glackens, and Shinn—moved to New York, Sloan followed, improved his oil technique, an was soon a full-fledged, exhibiting member of the Ashcan group.

The work of Sloan and other Ashcan artists is featured in one of the museum's virtual exhibitions, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York

Source: William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner. Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn.; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999).

Pictured top: Photograph of John Sloan, 1871–1951. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.

Pictured bottom: John Sloan, 1871–1951, Travelling Carnival, Santa Fe, 1924, oil, 30 1/4 x 36 1/8 in, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Cyrus McCormick.