Robert Henri

Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher born on June 24, 1865, in Ohio. Henri studied at both the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Though Thomas Eakins was no longer teaching at the Academy when Henri arrived, Eakins was immensely influential for Henri who regarded him as the superior portrait painter in the United States and followed Eakins’s bluntly realist style. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School of American realism and an organizer of the group known as The Eight, a loose association of artists who protested the restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design. Henri's philosophical and practical musings were collected by former pupil Margery Ryerson and published as The Art Spirit published in 1923, a book that remained in print for several decades. Henri's other students include George Bellows, Arnold Franz Brasz, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Henry Ives Cobb Jr., Lillian Cotton and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In the spring of 1929, Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York. Henri died on July 12, 1929, in New York.