In the early years of the twentieth century Jerome Myers made paintings of pinafored children outside homely brownstones and called to mind nineteenth-century genre paintings of barefoot boys that, with their imposed upon mien, fit recent theorisations of cute as a minor aesthetic category. John Sloan’s economic circumstance meant that he had to improvise a studio in the small apartment he shared with his wife Dolly, giving him an access and insight to the domestic sphere unusual for a man in this period. His paintings, etchings and drawings of women’s work draw on the compositional techniques of Dutch genre painters including Jan Steen and Gerrit Dou to frame this intimate knowledge of the cycles of everyday life. This paper considers these artists’ relationship to American and European genre traditions, and the ways in which their art corresponds with visions of city life and the everyday taking shape in the Progressive Era.
John Fagg is co-director of the American and Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Birmingham. He has written widely on American art of the early twentieth century and is the author of On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism (2009). He recently curated the exhibition Bellows and the Body at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and is currently working on a monograph project, Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1900-1940