Everett Shinn

In 1901, Everett Shinn made a six month visit to Paris, where he encountered the work of the French Impressionists for the first time. In particular, Shinn was drawn to their representations of contemporary entertainment and spectacle, particularly Degas's surreptitious views of performers backstage. During his time in France, Shinn also assiduously studied a wide range of Rococo paintings, and upon returning to the United States he began regularly producing neo-Rococo drawings, often erotic in nature. These sexually charged boudoir scenes combined his interest in the private, interior spaces of the Impressionists with the stylized sensuality of the Rococo. Shinn's work in this genre led to his inclusion in a project to illustrate an American edition of the novels of Charles Paul de Kock (1793-1871), a racy French novelist popular during the nineteenth century. Though the project did not come to full fruition, Shinn produced 16 drawings and watercolors for the novel Frederique, published in 1907 (Kasanof 1992, pp. 122-23). The vast majority of the erotic nudes produced by Shinn in the first two decades of the twentieth century were executed in red conté crayon, and later pastel, so the Morgan's graphite sketch is presumably of a later date. The sheet is also marked by the greater stylization and more deliberately provocative approach that Shinn brought to his boudoir scenes in the 1920s and 1930s. Shinns female figures evoke French graphic artists such as Paul Gavarni and Octave Tassaert, and their rather explicit sensuality suggests they were objects intended for private consumption rather than publication. Rory O'Dea, 2009.
Works cited: Nina Kasanof, The Illustrations of Everett Shin and George Luks (Dissertation: University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992).