The Ashcan School was the first art movement of the new century in America, and its first specifically modern style. Active in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Ashcan artists opposed the formality of conservative American art by painting urban subjects in a gritty, realistic manner. They gave form to the tough, optimistic, socially conscious outlook associated with Theodore Roosevelt's time. The Ashcan School artists shared a similar muckraking spirit with contemporary social reformers. Their exuberant and romantic sense of democracy had earlier been expressed in the poetry of Walt Whitman.

At a time before the camera had not yet replaced the hand-drawn sketch, four Philadelphia artist-reporters—William Glackens, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—gathered around the artist Robert Henri (1865-1929), first in his Walnut Street studio, then later in New York. Henri painted portraits in heavy, dark brown brushstrokes in a...