William James Glackens (Born 1870) was born in Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. He died in Westport, Connecticut in 1938. He was an artist whose paintings of middle-class urban life and street scenes rejected the 19th-century dictates of academic art and introduced a straightforward realism into the art of the United States. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and during his studies, he also worked as an illustrator for The Philadelphia Press, the Public Ledger, and the Philadelphia Record. In 1895, Glackens spent a year in Paris and then moved to New York City where he settled and worked as an illustrator for the New York World and The New York Herald. In 1898, Glackens went to Cuba to cover the American-Spanish War for McClure’s Magazine.
He also began to paint in oils while establishing his reputation as a graphic artist. The artist became a regular participant in the annual exhibitions of Pennsylvania Academy. His first important oil painting was the Hammerstein’s Roof Garden which he did in 1901. It was a cabaret scene and it was exhibited in New York at the Allen Gallery. Later on, he joined a group of artists whose interests were in depicting contemporary life. the leader of this group was called Robert Henri, and he’s the one with whom Glackens had traveled to Paris in 1895 other members of the group included Everett Shinn, George Luks, and John Sloan, as well as Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson, the more romantic painters.
