The Wake of the Ferry II

[john sefton]

John French Sloan, (born August 2, 1871, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 7, 1951, Hanover, New Hampshire), American painter, etcher and lithographer, cartoonist, and illustrator known for the vitality of his depictions of everyday life in New York City in the early 20th century.
Sloan was a commercial newspaper artist in Philadelphia, where he studied with Robert Henri. He followed Henri to New York, where in 1908 Henri, Sloan, and six others exhibited together as The Eight. Sloan’s realistic paintings of urban genre gave rise to the epithet “Ashcan School.” For most of his life Sloan taught intermittently and, interested in social reform, did illustrations for the socialist periodical The Masses. In 1939 he published The Gist of Art.
His best period was from 1900 to 1920. In works such as Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (1912); McSorley’s Bar (1912); and Backyards, Greenwich Village (1914), he drew his inspiration directly from life, from the warm, pungent humanity of the New York scene. They are usually sympathetic portrayals of working men and women. More rarely his works evoke a mood of romantic melancholy, as in Wake of the Ferry (1907). Occasionally, as in Fifth Avenue Critics, Sloan imparted a sharp satiric note into his work. Late in life Sloan turned back to the Art Nouveau motifs that had characterized his early work.
Sloan began painting The Wake of the Ferry II in 1907, his second version of this scene. The subject may well have been suggested by Sloan’s ferry trips with his wife from Jersey City to Philadelphia for medical treatments.
The stylistic influence of Robert Henri, so pervasive in Sloan's early work, is apparent here; the scene has been broadly conceived, spontaneously conveyed, and boldly brushed, in a limited palette of grays and near-blacks. The composition reinforces the mood; the ferry's tilted angle, framing a view of the rough waters, is arresting, and the diagonal of the wake receding into the mist reinforces the sense of loneliness and distance. In this setting, the small figure on the right, understated and half lost in shadow, becomes the essential actor in this version of Sloan's human comedy and brings into focus its melancholy expression.
Writing in A Collection in the Making, Duncan Phillips admired Sloan's ability to evoke a specific mood. "Sloan, during that earlier New York period," he wrote, "was a splendid painter and space composer. He could take the ugly facts of a scene like the deck of a ferry boat on a rainy day and make his use of gray not only dramatic but infinitely subtle in its scale of 'values.'"
In 1971 The Wake of the Ferry II was selected by the United States Postal Service for a stamp commemorating the centennial year of Sloan's birth.

[antoniacoole]

Sloan began picture The Wake of the Ferry II on May 8, 1907, soon after completing preparations for the exhibition of The Eight to be held at Macbeth Gallery the following February. In this work, Sloan capture the boat/river theme that is well-liked among the Best essay writing service members of his ring injecting a human element into the painting. The subject may well have be suggested by the occasion when Sloan accompanied his wife, Dolly, to the Jersey City ferry on way to Philadelphia for medical treatments.