Everett Shinn was part of the circle of resurgent realists led by Robert Henri (link). He was in fact the youngest of The Eight who exhibited at Macbeth Gallery in 1908, and he is generally regarded a key member of the Ashcan School. Yet of the coterie, he was the least "Ashcan" in creative spirit and topic interest. True, he produced the obligatory street scenes, river and bridge views, and glimpses of urban low life -- but his real element was among the well-to-do, the cultivated elite, the smart set. Mahonri Sharp Young writes: "He was the only one of the group who felt the attraction of pretty actresses, great ladies, and rich men. He was dazzled by the rich just as he was dazzled by women and the theater." Shinn himself stated, somewhat defensively:

"I was often accused of being a snob. Not at all. It's just the uptown life with all its glitter was more good looking; the people made pictures. And the clothes then -- the movement, the satins, women's skirts and men's coats, and the sweep of furs and swish of wild boas, oh Lord!"

As Young additionally points out, Shinn "was the only one of The Eight who did glamorize" the people and places recorded in his work.

Shinn's infatuation with the theatre went beyond his attending performances or using stage sets and theatre people as subjects for drawing and painting. In his studio at 112 Waverly Street, New York, he built a small stage, complete with proscenium and crimson curtains, with seating for an audience of fifty-five. There, between 1900 and 1912, he regularly acted in original shows with a company of friends he called the Waverly Street Players. Biographer Edith Shazo notes: "Shinn did everything: he was the playwright, director, and producer. He made the scenery, did the casting." Shinn actually wrote thirty-five plays, melodramas, and movie scenarios. While most are trite and long forgotten, his best-known vehicle, Hazel Weston, or, More Sinned Against Than Usual, played in seven languages for a quarter of a century. But what is probably his most memorable character line comes from the less successful Lucy Moore, The Prune-Hater's Daughter, wherein the crestfallen heroine cries at the dastardly adversary: "Oh, you prune, you've been my ruin!"

As further indication of Shinn's close involvement with the performing arts, in 1907 he employed a rococo-revival style to decorate the interior of his friend David Belasco's Stuyvesant Theatre in New York. Between 1917 and 1923 he also worked successively as art director for three movie companies: Samuel Goldwyn's first Goldwyn Pictures, Inspiration Pictures, and William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures. Best remembered films for which Shinn designed sets and properties include: Polly of the Circus (for GoIdwyn), The Bright Shawl (Inspiration), and Jamie Meredith (Cosmopolitan).

Unfortunately, as a serious fine artist, Shinn was inconsistent. He produced much mediocre work, a consequence, some critics feel, of overly diverse interests. Milton W. Brown, for one, finds: "Shinn was a man of many talents, and it was perhaps just this virtuosity which was his artistic undoing." Despite a small number of adept canvases, Shinn was the weakest of the Ashcan painters. Observing a characteristic Shinn mannerism, Barbara Rose states bluntly: "He uses a gay sprinkling of highlights to disguise what is essentially superficial technique." It would be kinder to say a rapid or sketchy or notational technique, and in that respect it was better suited to pastel, the medium by which he achieved his most competent and effective result. He was particularly fond of Edgar Degas' pastel work, both for rendering skill and for certain pieces that depict theatre or dance activity. Brown, fittingly, though with probable disparaging intent, calls Shinn "a minor echo of Degas."

The Hunter Museum's pastel, Actress in Red Before Mirror, from c. 1910, is Shinn at his best technique and favorite subject type. The attractive female performer is primping, one senses, shortly before the call to go on stage. Her figure is reflected in the full-length mirror, as is the curious, less distinct image of another woman a short distance away. As reflected, the second woman would have to be standing perpendicularly outside the picture space, to the viewer's right. The dark-garbed woman thus is the spectator's friend or consort, and it is partly because of her presence that the viewer is drawn psychically into the scene as a companion visitor to the dressing room. Interestingly, Degas was one of several French artists, including also Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, who had earlier found mirror reflection a novel and technically challenging visual effect, featuring it in a number of their impressionist works. Assuredly, Shinn was prompted to the motif by such examples.

Shinn was born to a Quaker family in the small southern New Jersey community of Woodstown; he was the youngest of eight children. As a boy he showed precocious ability both in art and in mechanics. At age fifteen he designed and built a working steam engine. Later the same year, 1891, he went to Philadelphia, where he enrolled in mechanical drawing classes and shop training at Spring Garden Institute. Just two years later, the seventeen-year-old took a position as illustrator with the Philadelphia Press, where he first met George Luks, William Glackens (link), John Sloan, and through that association, Robert Henri (link). Shinn also began classes in 1893 with Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1897 he moved to New York (the first of the Henri circle so to transfer) to work for the World and the Herald. He turned to magazine illustration in 1899, and eventually did commissions for the widely circulated Harper's Weekly.

A 1901 trip to Paris brought him initial contact with the theatre and with impressionism. Upon his return he took the Waverly Street studio. During the 1906-07 school year, he taught at the Art Students League. Like all the other members of The Eight, Shinn was invited to submit pieces for the 1913 Armory Show. Perhaps not fully anticipating its significance, he declined. Author Theodore Dreiser modeled the bohemian artist-character Eugene Witla in the 1915 novel, The Genius, after Shinn, his real-life, gregarious and fun-loving friend. Shinn was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1943. Less successful in his personal life, he was married and divorced four times. The last surviving member of The Eight, he died in New York in 1953, at age seventy-six.