Sold

Artists, especially U. S. artists, more especially U. S. artists with radical theories, are often heard to whine and mumble because men with money, i. e., art patrons, prefer to buy the works of "old masters." These whining, muttering artists are to some extent justified. But what must have been their surprise, their delight mixed with dismay, to learn, last week, that an anonymous art patron, i. e., a man with money, had spent $41,000 for 32 of the works of John Sloan, famed extant U. S. painter, president of the ultra-radical Society of Independent Artists?

Artist Sloan's first notable paintings were those which he made of Manhattan or Philadelphia streets and houses, engrossing not alone because they are energetic paintings full of motion and the suggestion of sound, but also because the scenes which they depict are now vanished. In these paintings--The Rathskeller, Philadelphia, Scrubwomen in the Old Astor Library, John Butler Yeats at Petitpas, The City from Greenwich--the figures have the frayed excitement, or the energetic grief that really appears in the faces of city people. Later, small, sparrowlike John Sloan left the city and painted in rock-bound Gloucester and puebloed Santa Fe. Recently he has been back again in Manhattan, painting cars and trolleys, houses with lighted doors and windows, loafers, little girls playing in the streets. The paintings which he sold, through the Kraushaar Galleries, to the anonymous plutocrat, include examples of his work in all three periods.

It would have been hard to find a more representative radical among modern U. S. artists than John Sloan. In 1907, before the advent of cubism and futurism, he was listed among the "original 8,"* revolutionist painters who were contrasted with the conservatives' "original 10." In 1918, he was elected president of the Independent Artists, to succeed William J. Glackens, and has since modestly declared that he is still president only because he has been "unable to get out of it."

Though the price of the 32 Sloans was the largest ever paid for the works of a living U. S. artist, it still did not rival the $55,000 which Mr. Knoedler & Co. paid when the collection of the late Charles H. Senff was sold last week, for Frans Hals's Portrait of a Dutch Lady. It is an interesting demonstration of the force of fashions among collectors that, in one evening's bidding at the same sale, 35 pictures by members of the Dutch School, Velazquez, and Corot (whose works bring the highest prices of all more recent artists) were sold for $346,150. The rest of the collection which onetime Sugar Merchant Senff had made in the 1890's brought the total price to $580,375. Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller of Massachusetts had his dealers buy Corot's Nymph Bathing.

*The other members of the "original 8": Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, Everett Shinn, William J. Glackens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, George Benjamin Luks. Five of them are Philadelphians.