| Everett Shinn | ||
| Birth Date: November 6, 1876 |
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| Death Date: May 1,1953 Artist Gallery |
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| Everett Shinn was born November 6, 1876 in Woodstown, New Jersey. At the age of sixteen, he left his birthplace for Philadelphia to study at the Spring Garden Institute. Shinn worked as a designer for a gas-fixtures company in Philadelphia from 1890 to 1893, after studying industrial design. While in Philadelphia, Shinn decided that he preferred fine arts and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. At the same time he worked as a reporter-artist for the Philadelphia Press. During these years Shinn met the future members of The Eight.
He moved to New York City in 1897 and continued his career as an illustrator and an artist. Altogether, he illustrated twenty-eight books and ninety-four magazine stories in addition to making cartoons and newspaper illustrations for New York Herald and The World. About 1899 he made the first of a series of murals and large panels for private houses and he painted eighteen panels for the Stuyvesant Theater. From 1917 to about 1923 Shinn worked for motion-picture companies as an art director. In addition to this, Shinn found the time for easel paintings and pastels and also managed to write and produce vaudeville sketches for his friends in his studio.
In his paintings, he found subject matter in the slums as well as in middle-class café society and in theatrical activities. His theater scenes were completed in oil, his slum and lower –class pictures in pastel.
Getting his start as a member of The Eight, Shinn enjoyed painting the more polite aspects of life, unlike many of his colleagues. He thought that the uptown life with all its glitter was more good looking. This attitude explains his concern with the theater and circus and also why it was Degas, the greatest painter of theater, who influenced Shinn during this time.
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