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William Glackens (American, 1870-1938)
The Shoppers, 1907
Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
© The Estate of William Glackens courtesy Kraushaar Galleries Inc. NY

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a small group of progressive American painters began to challenge the narrow academic tastes and restrictive juried exhibition system of New York's powerful National Academy of Design. Their challenge grew into an open revolt in February 1908, when the group, known as The Eight, mounted their first independent exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Led by Robert Henri, The Eight also included John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice B. Prendergast, and William J. Glackens, the painter of the Chrysler Museum of Art's The Shoppers.

Though The Eight produced works that varied widely in style, they were generally united in their commitment to ordinary subjects drawn from everyday life. Their passion for commonplace and sometimes gritty urban themes and their penchant for dark tonalities led unsympathetic critics to dub them "the apostles of ugliness" and "The Ashcan School." The historic Macbeth Gallery show marked the advent of twentieth-century American art in all its variety and individuality. It also laid the groundwork for another more influential New York exhibition of modern art, the 1913 Armory Show, which several of The Eight, including Glackens, were instrumental in organizing.

Among the seven paintings that Glackens showed at the Macbeth Gallery was The Shoppers. It is the largest of the artist's works and one of the most important examples of his early realist style. Like Sloan, Luks, and Shinn, Glackens worked initially in Philadelphia as a newspaper reporter and illustrator. (He would, in fact, continue these jobs at least until 1912.) His newspaper work surely helped to determine his choice of contemporary subjects for paintings like The Shoppers and influenced their mood of detached reportage.

Having already shown the picture at the 1907 Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, Glackens hastened to rework it for the Macbeth Gallery show. The painting's ambitious figurative composition gave him a good deal of trouble as he labored to refinish it. He documented his frustration in letters to his wife, Edith, who had left New York briefly to visit her family in Connecticut. On January 31, 1908, less than a week before the opening of the exhibition, Glackens wrote Edith that the picture had at last been "rescued" and would be ready for the show. His effort was rewarded, for The Shoppers was enthusiastically applauded by most of the critics.

The subject of the painting is a slice of middle-class New York life: well-dressed women shopping for clothes in a department store. The three principal figures are all portraits. The woman standing at center is Edith Glackens, who is shown inspecting a piece of lingerie offered by a saleswoman. Edith's companion at right is Florence (Mrs. Everett) Shinn. The woman at left, seated at the counter with her back turned to the viewer, represents another family friend, Lillian G. Travis, who was noted for her beautiful auburn hair. Mrs. Travis was an old schoolmate of Edith's from the Art Students League and a frequent visitor to the Glackens's Washington Square apartment. Glackens's paean to feminine consumerism stresses the expanding role that department stores played in the lives of leisured, middle-class women in early-twentieth-century New York. (Both Edith and Florence Shinn were from moneyed families.) In fact, the painting's setting may well be the Wanamaker department store that had only recently opened near Washington Square.

The somber palette of The Shoppers and its broadly handled forms recall the pictures of Diego Velázquez and Édouard Manet that Glackens had studied during his trips to Europe in 1895-96 and 1906. And Edgar Degas's many depictions of Parisian milliner's shops may have influenced the painting's basic mise en scène.

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