John Sloan, American, 1871–1951
Dreaming, 1906
Crayon and chisel on paper.
Gift of Frederic F. Taylor ’58, 2008.016
John Sloan is best known for his gritty and realistic paintings of urban life in Philadelphia and New York in the decades immediately after 1900. But Sloan, who began his artistic career as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was also a gifted draftsman. As a consequence, he was much in demand to create images, such as this, for magazines and books, which also provided him with an additional source of income.
Between 1904 and 1916, Sloan produced over 950 drawings and etchings. He worked during the “Golden Age of Illustration”—a time in which advances in technology spawned a multitude of inexpensive and often lavishly illustrated books and magazines.
Many of Sloan’s illustrations are notable for their natural kinship with his genre paintings. He urged others to emulate his practice: “Do illustrations for a while. It won’t hurt you. Get out of the art school and studio. Go out into the streets and look at life.”
Dreaming was commissioned for the essay Idella and the White Plague, by Joseph C. Lincoln, published in McClure’s Magazine in 1906. The story is of a daughter trying to cure her father of tuberculosis by rationing his diet and forcing him to sleep outside. Sloan depicts the moment when the father, Washington Arrow, has snuck back into the house and fallen asleep by the fire. Sloan’s drawings were frequently in crayon, but accentuating elements of the composition, such as the chair back, corn cob pipe, and long coat with a stylus is an unusual technique for him.
After 1916, as Sloan became increasingly successful as a painter, his illustration career waned. His last commercial assignment, done in 1950 at the age of seventy-one, was for Seventeen, a magazine for teenage girls.
Elysian McNiff ’08
Graduate Intern