{"id":12423,"date":"2018-08-13T14:53:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T18:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=12423"},"modified":"2025-07-26T15:22:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T19:22:00","slug":"searching-for-john-sloans-philadelphia-saloon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2018\/08\/searching-for-john-sloans-philadelphia-saloon\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for John Sloan\u2019s Philadelphia Saloon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Sloan, McSorley’s Bar, New York City, 1912, oil on canvas (Detroit Institute of Arts).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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Artist John Sloan considered the back room of McSorley’s a \u201csacristy.\u201d So, it follows naturally that his five oil paintings of the venerable New York ale house are sacred icons of saloon culture. Between 1912 and 1948, Sloan didn\u2019t merely depict life at McSorley\u2019s, he conflated, celebrated and elevated populist ideals of art, community and the urban male.<\/p>\n

Sloan may have depicted this in New York, but he had his awakening as an artist of the people back home in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Sloan\u2019s school of art was life itself, his own and that of others, and finally the streets of two great cities\u2014New York and Philadelphia,\u201d wrote John Butler Yeats at the time. He transformed, everyday scenes \u201cof robust lower-class Americans\u201d with \u201cspontaneous brushstrokes and unpolished depictions\u201d finding inspiration in everyday life. \u201cI saw people living in the streets and the rooftops of the city,\u2019 wrote Sloan, \u2018and I liked their fine animal spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRembrandt would have delighted in McSorley\u2019s,\u201d commented Hutchins Hapgood, \u201cVelasquez would have found his account there, too, as our own John Sloan does.\u201d This camaraderie, speculated art historian Mariea Caudill Dennison, \u201cmust have reminded him of his youthful experience as a member of [Robert] Henri’s group in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sloan left Philadelphia for New York in April 1904 at the hardly tender age of 33. In Philadelphia he first learned to appreciate what friend and mentor Henri liked to call \u201cthat eternal business of life.\u201d Sloan would also come to share Henri\u2019s firmly-held belief that painting was a \u201cman’s vocation,\u201d that “an artist’s life [was] a virile occupation.” Art deepened “mysterious bonds of understanding and knowledge among men.\u201d<\/p>\n

A perfect match for the long established, male-dominated saloon culture<\/a>. Henri\u2019s group, mocked as the \u201cAshcan School,\u201d created a new kind of art, one that refused to pander to what Sloan referred to as \u201cthe ignorant Listless Moneyed class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that we surmise Sloan\u2019s early saloon experiences were in Philadelphia, we\u2019re faced with the challenge: which of Philadelphia\u2019s many saloons was it? Where was it located? And does it survive today?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Patrick Rogan’s Taproom, Northeast corner, 9th and Berks Streets, February 24, 1903 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Of course, Sloan\u2019s Philadelphia saloon would have<\/em> to offer something<\/em> like McSorley\u2019s, a place, as Dennison put it, where \u201ca man could feel that he was the master of his own fate. …”a place where the world seems shut out, where there is no time, no turmoil. . .” A place with an owner and keeper who, according to Travis Hoke, was \u201cconsiderably more than the mere proprietor\u201d someone who is \u201cone of the biggest figures in the neighborhood\u2026a bartender, [a] counsellor in all the ways of life, [a] recipient of confidences, disburser of advice, arbiter of disputes, authority every subject.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoping for clues, we turn to Sloan\u2019s diaries<\/a> and find mention of a return visit to his family home in December 1906. \u201cArrived in Phila. at 5 o\u2019clock or thereabouts. The City (uptown) where I left the train looked so small I felt as tho\u2019 I should be able to look in the second story windows of the houses \u2014 yet this is the neighborhood in which I grew up from 7 years old to 30 years about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What neighborhood was that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sloans lived at 1921 North Camac Street, a rowhouse between 12th and 13th, Norris and Berks Streets. Back home in 1906 he savored some powerful memories, like making ice cream. \u201cWhen I was a boy I had to twist the freezer handle 35 minutes down cellar.  . . .with the jam shelf swinging overhead. I can bring the whole thing back: the old damp piece of red carpet, ingrain, that I used to cover over the finished job.  The twist in the wooden stairs going down cellar. The heaving ruggedness of the earth floor, the joists overhead where, toward the front end opposite the round furnace, I had a trapeze. Out there the gas meter that I so longed to take apart. The hole of mystery under the marble steps [in] front.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The left arrow indicates John Sloan’s residence at 1921 North Camac Street, what is now the center of Temple University’s Main Campus in North Philadelphia. The right arrow indicates Patrick Rogan’s Taproom, 9th and Berks Streets. (Source: 1910 Philadelphia Atlas, Philadelphia GeoHistory Network)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Interesting memories of this long-ago demolished house that stood north of where the belltower on Temple University\u2019s main campus is now. But no mention of a visit to the local saloon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was there one? Of course there was.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On September 25, 1900, John McDermott sold to Patrick Rogan the building at the Northeast corner of 9th and Berks Streets. Sloan would have been 29 years old and only three blocks away when Patrick Rogan opened his etched-glass double doors and tapped his first kegs. We\u2019re fortunate to have a photograph of it from 1903.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, alas, Rogan’s saloon is long gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Sources: Mariea Caudill Dennison, \u201cMcSorley’s: John Sloan’s Visual Commentary on Male Bonding, Prohibition, and the Working Class,”<\/a> American Studies<\/em>, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 23-38; Hutchins Hapgood, \u201cMcSorley\u2019s Saloon,<\/a>\u201d Harpers Weekly<\/em>, Vol 58, October 25, 1913; Travis Hoke, Corner Saloon<\/a>. The American Mercury<\/em>, March 1931, pp. 311-322; Grant Holcomb, \u201cJohn Sloan and \u2018McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,\u2019”<\/a> The American Art Journal<\/em>, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 4-20; Bruce St. John,\u201dJohn Sloan in Philadelphia, 1888-1904\u201d<\/a> The American Art Journal<\/em>, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 80-87; John Sloan, The Gist of Art<\/em> (New York, American Artists Group, Inc. 1939); John Sloan\u2019s Diaries, 1906-1913<\/a>,<\/em> The Delaware Art Museum; John Butler Yeats, \u201cThe work of John Sloan,\u201d Harper’s Weekly<\/em>, November 22, 1913; Real Estate Transfers, The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, Sept 28, 1900]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist John Sloan considered the back room of McSorley’s a \u201csacristy.\u201d So, it follows naturally that his five oil paintings of the venerable New York ale house are sacred icons of saloon culture. Between 1912 and 1948, Sloan didn\u2019t merely depict life at McSorley\u2019s, he conflated, celebrated and elevated populist ideals of art, community and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}