Reading in the Subway

Edition of 100, 85 printed.
John Sloan was a member of the Ashcan School of artists, who favored realistic portrayals of daily urban life. Like others in the group, he began his career as an illustrator; the poster behind the woman in this etching, which reads "Rub with Sloan's Ointment," is a wry allusion to his own commercial work. Sloan introduced a note of voyeurism into the scene by emphasizing the light falling on the woman's crossed legs. The artist inscribed several lines of verse by the seventeenth-century poet Sir John Suckling.