Robert Henri was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to John Jackson Cozad. After John Cozad fatally shot a man, he relocated his family to Denver, Colorado and Robert changed his name to Robert Earl Henri. The family moved to New York City in 1883, where the young Robert painted his first artworks.
Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, studying under Thomas Anschutz, a protégé of Thomas Eakins. He moved to Paris in 1888 and studied with William-Adolphe Bouguereau at the Académie Julian, and took courses at the École des Beaux Arts. He returned to the U.S. in 1891, studying with Robert Vonnoh at the Pennsylvania Academy.
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Henri was a popular artist and teacher in Philadelphia and organized the “Charcoal Club” with William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. At this time, Henri also began to question his interest in Impressionism and began exhorting friends to seek out new subjects within the urban American landscape. The grittier paintings that resulted became known as the Ashcan School. Henri returned to Paris and then moved to New York, where he taught students at the New York School of Art, including George Bellow, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and Joseph Stella. When several of his colleagues were rejected from the 1907 National Academy exhibition, Henri quit the jury to curate his own counter-exhibition.
The resulting 1908 exhibition at Macbeth Galleries proved to be an historic show. The exhibitors — Henri, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, and Arthur B. Davies — were coined The Eight, and their effort proved transformative. Several of the participants went on to organize the seminal 1913 Armory Show, in which Henri exhibited.
Henri taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York, and spent time painting in Ireland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. He died in 1929, leaving behind a legacy of not only his art, but generations of students.
This is one of 17 known portraits of Cori Peterson, a young girl from Haarlem, the Netherlands, that Henri painted in the summer of 1907. Laughing Child was formerly in the collection of the family of the late Norman Hirschl, one of America’s most respected and influential New York art dealers and a champion of the Ashcan School painters.