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back mentally what was an emotional state. His drawings of New York Streets, tenements, fire escapes, pushcarts, people were full of incidents and more alive than life could ever be. He would make a drawing over and over again until he got what he really wanted. He was never satisfied.

Henri's influence on Luks was more indirect than with the rest of us newspaper artists. We used to meet at Henri's on Thursday evenings and it was he who gave us the impulse to work in our spare time. Luks, after a training in Munich, had gone into graphics. He met up with our gang while I was still on the Inquirer. We were all painting on the side, stirred on by Henri's encouragement and criticism. But Luks just took up painting on his own - would never admit any influence of Henri's had anything to do with his sudden decision to paint.

Luks used to be wonderful as an entertainer. But the story of his having been a prize fighter is pure invention. There was an analogy of a kind between Luks and Goya, both in their work and tragic deaths. Luks wasn't really anything of a fighter. He would often pick a fight in a saloon, say something nasty and get things going and then leave the place, with people who had nothing to do with the argument left to finish the fracas.

His favorite book was the Ingoldsby Legends. He was very keen on that kind of English flavour, things like Tristram Shandy. He would amuse a crowd and its bartenders for hours, assuming that he was some fictitious character, senator, lawyer or big business man. On one occasion in Henri's studio, mounted on a chair atop a table, with a frying pan over a gas jet, he made Welsh rarebit, carrying on a stream of farcical remarks while a dozen of us waited our turn to be served.

Everett Shinn came to the art staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer a year or two after I had made my start there. He as the youngster of the group that met at Henri's studio talk-fests, an amazingly talented boy, clever, and with a facile pencil. He seemed to spend his entire income on clothes and yet never conformed to the fashion. He had his tailor produce striking originalities in coats and his shirts were a gay legion although often far scattered. He loved to observe the night life of the city and later in New York made scores of drawings and paintings of these subjects.

I went from high school to work, first with Porter and Coates, the book publishers, and then with A. Edward Newton who later became famous as a bibliophile. I first knew him at Porter and Coates. He left there to go into the fancy goods business where he was well known as an alert businessman. He made mouchoirs and candy boxes. There were twenty-eight girls drawing and painting, two boys in the shipping department. I used to make designs for calendars, and etchings of the homes of the poets, etc. I got nine dollars a week. One girl got as high as forty. She painted copies of French couples courting in the Directoire manner, for tops of candy boxes. He had Huyler's and Maillard's orders. There was one girl who was very clever with her brush. Newton would come up from the cellar with a candy box that had a spot on it somewhere and say, "Miss Lawrence, drop a violet on this spot."

I left after two years and free-lanced for a period, then took a job on the Inquirer and a few years later went to the Press where I remained ten years. Then I came to New York, doing free-lance in illustration and painting the town in spare time, of which there was plenty.

This large collection of the work of four well known artists is probably the first ever assembled on the basis of a background of "newspaperman" origin, and perhaps Philadelphia will take more pride in having bred us than we have been aware of heretofore.

John Sloan

LIFE ON THE PRESS

A newspaper, designed to serve a public that demands its news with everything else in one gulp, lands each morning at the back door with a milk bottle...Orange juice eases the way for the shock of the headlines...Coffee dilutes a stack of buttered editorials...Toast soaks up the weather forecast...Milk-sloshed cereals dissolve politics...Marmalade sweetens the comics...and the obituaries are tucked away with a dose of bicarbonate of soda...to later explode on a commuter's train.

By this necessity to race all competitors in the delivery of news, all who contribute to its make-up must run a daily gantlet of editorial-policy clubbing and business-office exactions. Editorial surgeons and topping internes make ready the appeasing comfort for the straining mother of news bolted to her concrete bed. News. News, or she expires in an inkless shroud, or her inky offspring bawl lustily in the dawn, clothed in the sumptuous ermine of full page advertisements or limp forth on crutches, bare-shanked and shivering in the scant rags of niggardly commercial appeal.

In the Art department of the Philadelphia Press on wobbling, ink-stained drawing boards William J. Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and John loan went to school, a school now lamentably extinct...a school that trained memory and quick perception. For in those days, there was not on any newspaper the handy use of the camera, that dependable box of mechanical memory which needed only the prodding of a finger to record all and sundry of the editor's wish. In those days the camera was a vacationist's gadget, or that black-draped threat to a child's peace of mind when a wooden bird piped its cuckoo lay and the photographer acted the role of a first class idiot in coaxing a smile from a tear-stained face.

In the newspaper's photo-engraving room reposed the only camera, that wheezed its corrugated lungs back and forth as it nosed its discerning eye in sharpening focus on the artist's pen-and-ink drawing, the first step in the reproductive process.

The Art department of a newspaper of 1900 was a school far more important in the initial training of the mind for quick perception than the combined instruction of the nation's art schools. In one year of daily assignments there would be an upslant against the bogging down of the present-day artist's work and mind...who now depends on the camera, tracing paper and cabinets of clipped and catalogued reference...

The four mentioned men and many others who had the schooling of newspaper pictorial reporting, have been forever grateful for the rigid requirements that compelled them to observe, select and get the job done. Day by day and year by year they accumulated a valuable library of reference, not catalogued in cumbersome cabinets and files but in readiness in the lighter and more easily transported compact cells of the mind.

They carried envelopes, menu cards, scraps of paper, laundry checks and rendered bills or frequently nothing to their work. Glackens, least of all of them, needed pencil and paper. His memory was amazing...One look on an assignment was much the same to him as taking an exhaustive book of that incident from a shelf where at his drawing board he opened it and translated it into pen lines...Sloan rarely left the office with more than a vest-pocket pad.

The ink valves spit and the giant spools of virgin paper take the imprint of world affairs...stamping out fact and fiction, conjecture and lies, smearing a black two-mile

Transcription Notes:
Mouchoir definition, a handkerchief.