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Artist

John Sloan (Primary)

Title

Fun, One Cent

Date

1905

Century

20th century

Medium & Support

Etching on cream colored paper

Dimensions

Sheet: 9 1/8 x 11 5/8 in. , Image: 4 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.

Style

Ash Can School

Object Type

Prints

Credit Line

Museum purchase in memory of Nat C. Myers and Dick Albyn with funds provided by Leah Karpen, Fran Myers, Kenneth Myers, Russell & Ladene Newton, and Ute Roth

Accession Number

2009.06.63

Copyright

In Copyright
© Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A founding member of the group of Realist artists known as The Eight, Sloan was dedicated to rendering scenes of daily life in the city, a subject embraced by his artistic circle, which included Robert Henri, George Wesley Bellows, and George Luks. Sloan depicts a moment in history with his etching Fun, One Cent. Created in 1905, the print captures young girls’ excitement over the novelty of an early moving-picture device in a penny arcade and its risqué content (“Girls In Their Night Gowns—Spicy”). Patented in 1894, the mutoscope was a hand-cranked machine that flipped through hundreds of still pictures, simulating movement. Invented and marketed during the same period as the first silent films, the mutoscope and its rival, the kinetoscope, offered a cheaper, more personal experience than projected films. Sloan’s image provides modern viewers an early example of new technology merging with popular entertainment and its accompanying challenge to social conventions. —

Exhibition Title: Asheville Art Museum: An Introduction to the Collection
Label Date: 2021
Type: Catalogue Entry
Written by: Cindy Buckner

In much of his early work, John Sloan exercised the traditional prerogative of focusing on the woman’s gaze, investigating and even criticizing spectatorship and visual pleasure. For women navigating urban spaces at the turn of the 20th century, and the youth culture of the working-class, the penny arcade offered a welcome leisure activity in the new age of modernity. Depicted here, a group of young women, mingling and laughing, stand before an arcade machine that offers a harmless, scandalous glimpse of pictures of “girls in their night gowns—spicy” or “those naughty girls” for the cost of one cent. An important artist of the American Scene movement of art in the United States who later went on to become a Works Project Administration artist, Sloan regularly depicted urban life and leisure in New York City.

Exhibition Title: In the Age of the Etching Revival: Prints from the Asheville Art Museum Collection
Label Date: October 12, 2022–January 23, 2023
Written by: Alexis Meldrum

• Ashcan School