Everett Shinn (6 November 1876 - 1 May 1953), Us Ashcan School painter, illustrator, stage designer, film director.
A complex artistic peersonality, Shinn was born in New Jersey, but moved in 1897 to New York, where he worked as an illustrator for several prestigious publications, starting with the famous Harper's Weekly. He studied industrial design at Spring Garden School in Philadelphia, between 1888 - 1890, and then left for Paris, together with George Luks.
Since 1893 he worked as an illustrator for Philadephia Press and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he met several young artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens. Influenced by the urban realism of their creations, Shinn began working in the same style, trying to reproduce on the canvas the bleak aspects of city life.
Shinn had been for a long time passionate about theatre, not only for the plays, but also for the life outside of the stage. In 1907 he produced a series of 18 decorative panels for Stuyvasant Theater in New York, and slowly but surely theatre became his main, then his only theme. An important member of The Eight, he broke up with them a little before the famous Armory Show of 1913. For the next few years, up until 1923, he painted mainly stage sets and compositions inspired by the theatre.
