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36. EVERETT SHINN. Matinee, Paris Music Hall, 1902. American British Art Center.

ARTIST OF THE PRESS

THE exhibition of artists of the Philadelphia Press at the Philadelphia Museum of Art would have brought delight to the late Talcott Williams, first head of the Pulitzer School of Journalism, who was for years a member of the Press editorial staff. He always boasted that the Press had produced a galaxy of fine artists. Alden March, our old Sunday editor who was later on the New York Times, would agree. And yet the real influence behind the efforts of these newspaper illustrators to express themselves in paint, came from their contacts with Robert Henri.

Shinn and I are now the survivors of this group that has apparently become important in American art annals as contributing one half of the now famous "Eight."

The true story of the "Eight" should be told here for the record. In 1908 Robert Macbeth. Senior, asked Henri to get together some of the work of artists in whose work Henri was interested, as he would like to show such an exhibition. Henri chose Glackens, Luks, Lawson, Davies, Prendergast, Shinn and Sloan.

The exhibition made a stir and had much publicity. Fredrick J. Gregg, a writer on the New York Evening Sun, dubbed us the "Eight." The show went to Philadelphia and Chicago and as far as we were concerned the incident was closed.

It is not hard to recall the Press "art department": a dusty room with windows on Chestnut and Seventh Streets - walls plastered with caricatures of our friends and ourselves, a worn board floor, old chairs and tables close together, "no smoking" signs and a heavy odor of tobacco, and Democrats (as the roaches were called in this Republican stronghold) crawling everywhere. But we were as happy a group as could be found and the fun we had there took the place of college for me. Like most newspaper men of those days we knew nothing of world troubles; a care-free life such as the birds lead.

That is has perhaps been difficult to find many of the original pen drawings of our past in Philadelphia is in part due to the fact that C. W. Parker, a promoter from New York, used to come to Philadelphia for three months every year to run a sale of drawings and paintings by the newspaper artists. He would get advance contributions from business men and they would select work from the exhibition to the amount of their contribution. Parker made a commission on the affair. Through these sales, from which we artists of course got most of the purchase money, we lost track of a great deal of our work.

Glackens had just stepped out of the Press when I came over from the Inquirer. Luks had gone on to the New York World where he did a comic strip.

"Butts" Glackens was very quiet, gentle, handsome. A lot went on inside of Glackens' mind, though he always kept his opinion to himself. He was always liked. He came to the Press staff from the Public Ledger.

I knew him longer than any other artist, first at Central High School in Philadelphia when I was twelve and a half years old and he was thirteen. Then my mother took me out of school for a half term on account of my eyes. She had the idea that my eyes would improve. So I lost a year and went on with the Ninety-first Class instead of the Ninetieth, of which Dr. Albert C. Barnes was a member.

Glackens' paintings were produced from about 1898, starting with a dark period during the popularity of color impressionism, under Henri's influence; and in the final period going into the full color orchestration, in the tradition of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Renoir.

Glackens was certainly the greatest draughtsman who lived this side of the ocean. He could draw anything he wanted to in any way he wanted to. He had the ability to bring