A close look at early 20th-century New York City is revealed through the eyesof Ashcan artist John Sloan.

John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 - September 7, 1951) was a U.S. artist. As a member of The Eight, a group of American artists, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century," and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs.

This fascinating book highlights the artist’s early career as an illustrator and how it influenced his work as a painter and shaped his response to modernism.

Reprint of: John Sloan's New York scene. -- New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Documenting New York City's cultural coming-of-age, a historical biography of an American painter and propagandist reveals the social and political scene of the early 1900s, including Sloan's activist wife, Dolly.