William Glackens started his career as an artist-reporter. Born in Philadelphia in 1870, he enrolled in the evening classes taught by Robert Henri at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of twenty-one. At the same time, he supported himself by doing drawings for the Philadelphia Record, a job which gave him an unparalleled opportunity to develop a sharp eye, a keen memory and a deft touch.

After a few years of newspaper work, he went to Paris in 1895 and was deeply impressed by what he saw of the painting of Edouard Manet and Auguste Renoir. He returned to the United States late in 1895 and settled in New York where, as in Philadelphia, he continued to earn his living as an illustrator. He worked for the New York Herald and the Sunday World but at the same time started to enter the major annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy and elsewhere.

Another trip to Europe followed in 1906; this time Glackens sought out the paintings of Velásquez in Spain before settling in Paris for a time. He was already emerging from under the mantle of Manet and the Spanish and Dutch realists, however. His early masterpiece, Chez Mouquin (l905, Chicago Art Institute), shows this development from realism to impressionism.

In 1908 Glackens joined with Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson and Maurice Prendergast in the famous exhibition of The Eight. Reviewers vehemently criticized their subject matter scenes of everyday city life and, in the process, gave them unexpected notoriety.

In 1912, Glackens went abroad again with $20,000 from his friend, Albert Barnes, to purchase a remarkable group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that would become the nucleus of the distinguished Barnes Foundation collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. His own late work reflects the bright color, perceptible brushwork and recreational subjects of the artists he collected for Barnes Renoir, Degas, Matisse, and others. Glackens’s uniqueness, however, lies in his having spent his early career as an artist/reporter. The painter Everett Shinn, writing in l943, recalls the photographic memory of his friend:

All things within the range of William J. Glackens' vision were...unconsciously absorbed and catalogued in orderly fashion for any immediate usage. His eyes were veritable harvesters of the total limits of his sight.

Glackens was also responsible for selecting the American paintings to be included in the famous 1913 Armory Show. His own work was shown in most of the important exhibitions in this country and was accorded a Gold Medal for drawing at the Pan American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, in 1901; a Silver Medal for painting and a Bronze Medal for illustrations at the St. Louis Exposition of l904; an Honorable Mention at the 1905 International Exposition of the Carnegie Institute; a Bronze Medal at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; and the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1914.

He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Illustrators, the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers and the Society of Independent Artists. His work is represented in the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania; and in many other public and private institutions.


LB


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