Subway Stairs

John Sloan was an American painter and printmaker known for urban scenes and social realist subjects rendered in oil and etching. Active in early twentieth-century New York, he documented city life with particular attention to working-class neighborhoods and street activity. His work appeared in the groundbreaking 1908 exhibition at Macbeth Gallery that helped establish American modernism. Sloan's etchings and paintings combined observation with a democratic regard for ordinary subjects often excluded from academic art practice.

Philadelphia, PA, USA