American Art Collaborative

Referring to Cori, the young sitter in this portrait, Robert Henri wrote, “One of my 2 models is a little white headed broad faced red cheeked girl of about 8 always laughing.” Henri was the founder of the Eight, a group of American painters who launched independent group exhibitions beginning in 1908 at the Macbeth Gallery. Many of them were his students at the Art Students League in New York. Sarcastically dubbed “the Ashcan school” by the press, these artists explored urban life in all its varieties. This portrait was painted the summer prior to Henri’s groundbreaking exhibition, when he took a group of students to the Netherlands for study.