Born Robert Henry Cozad, Robert Henri was the son of a riverboat gambler and land speculator. Before he was eighteen, he had lived in Cozad, Nebraska, a town his father established, as well as in Denver, Colorado. When his father shot and killed an employee during a disagreement, the family fled east, assuming various surnames to protect themselves from the law.
In 1886 Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, studying with Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Hovenden. From 1888 until 1891 he was in Paris, working at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury and briefly matriculating at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He toured popular sketching sites in rural France and in Venice during this European stay. By early 1892, the artist had returned to Philadelphia and resumed classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, studying with Robert Vonnoh.
By nature a mentor and leader, Henri began his teaching career in 1892 by taking a position at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art). By 1893 he had opened his own summer school in Darby Creek, Pennsylvania. He attracted numerous young Philadelphia artists and newspaper illustrators to his circle, including William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. Later, in New York, these men would form the core of the Eight.
Accompanied by Glackens, Henri returned to Europe in 1895 and stayed for two years. Based in Paris, he visited England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Holland. His high-keyed Impressionist style yielded to the darker palette of the seventeenth-century masters Hals, Rembrandt, and Velásquez as well as of Edouard Manet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Another extended European sojourn, from 1898 to 1900, brought him growing attention. His work was included in several of the salons sponsored by the liberal Société National des Beaux-Arts, and it was from one of these exhibitions that the French government purchased his painting La Neige (1899, Musée du Louvre).
In 1900 Henri settled in New York, where over the next several decades he supported himself by teaching. His various affiliations included William Merritt Chase's New York School of Art (1902-12), the Modern School of the Ferrer Society (1911-16), and the Art Students League (1912-28). His work, seen in solo exhibitions and in group shows with artists such as Glackens, Shinn, Sloan, and Ernest Lawson, garnered increasing attention.
Henri joined the Society of American Artists in 1903 and was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design two years later, serving on the committee that merged the two organizations in the spring of 1906. He was active on juries for Academy shows until 1907, when, in a protest against exclusionary exhibition policies, he removed two works from consideration in that year's annual.
Henri's rebellious leadership fostered the formation of the independent exhibition group known as the Eight, which shunned the genteel Impressionism that had marked Academy annuals in favor of scenes reflecting gritty urban reality. The Eight's landmark exhibition debuted at the Macbeth Galleries in New York in February 1908 and toured to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several other venues. Henri also organized the Exhibition of Independent Artists, held in New York in 1910. Other advances in art soon eclipsed his Ashcan realism. The European avant-garde abstraction that began dominating American art after the opening of Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1907 and the Armory Show of 1913 held little interest for him.
In later years, Henri investigated both the color theories of Hardesty Maratta, which resulted in a broader range of colors in his palette, and the theory of dynamic symmetry espoused by Jay Hambidge, which led Henri to stabilize his compositions through classical geometries. After 1910, when the wilderness of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland captured his imagination, he remained committed to representational art as the best means to express his beliefs about life and humanity.
Over the course of his long and distinguished teaching career, Henri's social progressivism inspired students to pursue their individual talents. Realists such as George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent and modernists such as Patrick Henry Bruce, Andrew Dasburg, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Man Ray, and Morgan Russell trained with him. Henri's book The Art Spirit, whose text was drawn from his lectures and essays, was published in 1923. At his death the Academy's eulogy noted "his vividness, versatility and cosmopolitanism." In 1931 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, presented a memorial exhibition of his work.
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