Robert Henri

born Cincinnati, Ohio, 1865; died New York, New York, 1929

BiographyRobert Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865. When he was still a child, his father was accused of murder over a land dispute in the Nebraska town he founded, so his family fled and changed their names. Henri began his formal studies in 1886 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then enrolled at the Académie Julian, Paris. Over the next 12 years he moved between Europe and the United States, teaching first at the Philadelphia School of Design, then establishing an art school in Paris, and by 1900 landing in New York. During this time he also exhibited widely, gaining an international reputation. In New York Henri’s studio became a gathering place for artists, including the men who later became known as The Eight. The independent and outspoken Henri became the leader of the Ashcan school, a new movement that championed painting as a personal interpretation of an artist’s experiences. Henri first visited the West when he traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1916. There he painted a series of direct, expressive portraits of Native American sitters from the surrounding pueblos. He returned to Santa Fe over several subsequent summers.

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