Robert Henri (1865-1929)
He was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865. After his father shot a man to death in 1882 and was indicted for murder Mrs. Cozad moved young Robert to Atlantic City, New Jersey and the young man changed his name to Robert Henri.
He enrolled in 1885 at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Thomas Anschutz. In 1888 he made his first trip to Europe and until 1891 he attended the Academy Julian in Paris. In 1891 he was accepted and admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but by the fall had returned to Philadelphia to teach at the Women’s School of Design. His teaching philosophy of “being true to one’s self” and visual honesty made him a revered teacher. From 1896 to 1900 he was back in Paris teaching and sold a painting there to a French museum. He settled permanently in New York in 1901 and opened the Henri Art School in New York City in 1909, as well as organizing “The Eight,” a group of artists that had publicly rejected what they viewed as restraints from the National Academy of Design in 1908.
Henri was one of the founders of the Ashcan School, a group of urban realists that also included George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. Henri openly rebelled against traditional ideas of artistic expression, and along with his Ashcan cohorts, mounted “The Eight” exhibition in New York in 1908, a show that helped redefine American modern art. From 1925 to 1928, Henri taught at the Art Students League in New York. A book titled “The Art Spirit” is a compilation of his teachings and letters and summarizes his attitudes towards art. Robert Henri died of cancer at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan in 1929.