Robert Henri Prints

About Robert Henri

Robert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati in June 1865; the family changed its name after his father shot a man in a Nebraska land dispute. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy and in Paris, and in Philadelphia gathered the newspaper artists Sloan, Glackens, Luks and Shinn into a circle that became the Ashcan School. In New York from 1900 he painted the snowy streets and the river, then fast, dark portraits of children, dancers and working people from Spain to Ireland to Santa Fe. In 1908 he organized the exhibition of The Eight in protest at the National Academy's juries, and as a teacher at the Art Students League, whose lectures became The Art Spirit, he taught Bellows, Hopper and Stuart Davis. He died in New York in July 1929. His portraits print as warm, direct faces for a hallway or study.