John French Sloan, A Woman’s Work, 1912
The subject of this painting — a woman hanging out laundry behind a city apartment building — is typical of the subjects chosen by American artist John Sloan (1871–1951). Sloan and a group of his allies became famous as realists; critics derided them as the “Ash Can school” because they did not paint rural landscapes or other conventional subjects considered worthy of painting. Sloan, though, warned against seeing his paintings as simple representations of reality, even if he described his work as based on “a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.” “‘Looks like’ is not the test of a good painting,” he wrote: “Even the scientist is interested in effects only as phenomena from which to deduce order in life.” Cleveland Museum of Art. Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White.