John Sloan, The Coffee Line, 1905
John Sloan (American 1871–1951)
The Coffee Line, 1905
Oil on canvas, 21 1/2 × 31 5/8 in (54.61 × 80.33 cm)
Carnegie Museum of Art, Fellows of the Museum of Art Fund, 83.29
This was my first really serious museum acquisition and was the last major early painting by Sloan in the John Sloan estate. It portrays a wind-blown winter night in Madison Square in New York, where a long line of cold, hungry men wait for the free cups of coffee being dispensed to promote one of the Heart newspapers. I first saw the painting in a Sloan show in Madison, Wisconsin, while driving to take up my job in Pittsburgh, and later tracked down John Sloan’s widow, Helen, who amazingly, was still alive, and persuaded her to sell the painting to the Carnegie Institute. It was a singularly fitting place for the painting, since it had won a prize at the Carnegie International in 1905, when Robert Henri and Thomas Eakins were serving on the jury. It’s a tough piece of art. The painting is so black and simple that some people are put off, but that’s what I like about it. The blackness nicely evokes the despair of being homeless and the near-abstract simplicity of the design both reveals Sloan’s great debt at this time to the work of Whistler, who was the artistic god of the time to artists of advanced taste, and foreshadows the abstract effects that would dominate American art later in the century. Because of the friendship we struck up at the time, Helen Sloan also arranged for a large group of early Sloan prints to be donated to the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Bibliography
Henry Adams, Masterworks of the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute (collection handbook of l50 selected works), Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, November l985, pp. 230-31.
Henry Adams, "John Sloan's The Coffee Line," Carnegie Magazine, LVII, no. 6, November-December, l984, l9-24, 6 illustrations in black-and white.