1903

The Hungry Cat

American, 1871 - 1951

This drawing is an especially lively example of John Sloan's "realist" illustration style, toward which he had begun moving by 1902, abandoning the flat, patterned "poster" manner of his previous decade of activity as a newspaper artist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Press. The year after this commission Sloan moved to New York, gradually giving up his career as an illustrator to become one of America's premier early-twentieth-century painters of ordinary people and everyday life.