JOHN SLOAN 1871-1951
Recruiting in Union Square, 1909
Oil on canvas, 26 X 32" (66.04 x 81.28 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 954-0-140

John Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania and grew up in Philadelphia. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1892, first with Thomas Anshutz, and later with Robert Henri. Sloan's professional career as an artist began as an illustrator for Philadelphia newspapers, the Enquirer and the Press. Moving to New York in 1904, he continued working in commercial art until 1916 when he began a long association with the Art Students League as a teacher. Influenced by Henri and his teachings on realism, a group of eight artists, including John Sloan, rebelled against the National Academy of Design by organizing their own independent exhibition in 1908. Named The Eight by the press, these artists were a strong force in promoting a bold and unromanticized form of realism.
Street scenes were a natural subject for Sloan and the New York Realists. His New York paintings feature a capacity for rendering narrative, chronicling life in the form of visual anecdotes. The idea for Recruiting in Union Square was conceived on May 10, 1909 as Sloan noted in his diary, "loafed about Madison Square where the trees are heavily daubed with fresh green and the benches filled with tired 'bums near the fountain is a U.S. Army recruiting sign, two samples of our military are in attendance but the bums stick to the freedom of their poverty. There is a picture in this. . . ." Three days later Sloan embarked on the painting, as his diary entry for May 13, 1909 reads "painted in the afternoon. Started a City Square with Recruiting Service sign displayed among the 'bench warmers'."
The title of the work was transposed to "Union Square," though Madison Square was the locale which had originally inspired the subject.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts jurors Elmer Schofield, Robert Henri, Thomas Anshutz, and Charles Hawthorne selected Recruiting in Union Square for exhibition as the result of their studio visit on January 6, 1910. The work was exhibited at the January, 1910 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Exhibition, the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists, and numerous other exhibitions during Sloan's lifetime.
Under the influence of Robert Henri, Sloan became interested in formal theories of color and composition. Sloan's diaries first make mention of his introduction, by Henri, to the color system of Hardesty Maratta on June 13, 1909. This system created a highly structured, systematized formula for pigments and tonal relationships. Recruiting in Union Square, however, was painted before he began employing this system. He inaugurated use of the system on the next painting, which he began in the fall of 1909, and relied on it continually throughout his career.
Recruiting in Union Square was painted about six months before Sloan became a member of the Socialist Party. Writing about the painting, he stated, "I saw a free man being tempted into monkey clothes, but my intention ... had nothing to do with the Socialist doctrine-just my natural feeling about human freedom." He reiterated that he felt no social obligation and attempted never to involve art with propaganda or politics, instead using his satirical cartoons and illustrations for political expression. However, on another occasion he stated, in contradiction to this, that there was an element of propaganda in Recruiting in Union Square that caused him discomfort. Although he made a conscious attempt to keep his political beliefs separate from his art, he felt they may have kept him from painting many more city pictures.
While Sloan's work is commonly associated with urban views, he became interested in other themes and locales, producing many landscapes of Gloucester, Massachusetts and Santa Fe as well as numerous figurative subjects which comprise a large part of his oeuvre. Sloan continued painting New York scenes until the late 1940s, but city subjects became less appealing to him and he produced fewer in later years.

VALERIE ANN LEEDS