Background
Everett was born on November 6, 1876 at Woodstown, New Jersey, United States, the son of Isaiah Conklin Shinn, a bank teller, and Josephine Ransley Shinn. The family was Quaker.
Everett was born on November 6, 1876 at Woodstown, New Jersey, United States, the son of Isaiah Conklin Shinn, a bank teller, and Josephine Ransley Shinn. The family was Quaker.
Following an elementary education at Bacon Academy in Woodstown, Shinn went to Philadelphia at the age of fifteen. Studies in mechanics (1888 - 1890) at the Spring Garden Institute and employment as a designer of lighting fixtures preceded his enrollment in 1893 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Thomas P. Anshutz was continuing the instructional tradition of Thomas Eakins.
While serving as staff artist for the Philadelphia Press, he formed friendships with William Glackens, George Luks, and John Sloan, thus becoming one of the newspapertrained "Philadelphia Four, " who met often in the painting quarters of Robert Henri and who formed the nucleus of a new wave of urban realism in American art.
Shinn had moved to New York City. He worked for the New York World and acquired extensive experience as an illustrator, especially for Harper's Magazine. An exhibition of his pastels at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1897 consisted of deftly caught impressions of city life and the theater - constant themes in his work.
Among frequent exhibitions that followed, one that epitomized Shinn's role in the art of his time was the dissident exhibit of "The Eight" (Shinn, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast), protesters against the restrictive policies of the National Academy of Design, which was held at New York's Macbeth Galleries in the winter of 1908. Among Shinn's eight entries in that show was London Hippodrome, which reflected his brief (and only) trip abroad in 1900. A strain of theatricality in Shinn's nature colored everything that he did.
It was De Wolfe who encouraged him in a new field of decorative art and who repeatedly commissioned him, as did the architect Stanford White, to paint murals in a "rococo revival" style. Shinn was the decorator of David Belasco's Stuyvesant Theatre, which opened in 1907. At other times he painted murals in the realistic vein of his cityscapes, the most notable being two industrial scenes in the council room of the city hall in Trenton, New Jersey (1911), and the wintry exterior views adorning the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel in New York City (1944).
As a further extension of his theatrical affiliations and decorating activities, Shinn was art director between 1917 and 1923 for three motion picture firms: Goldwyn Pictures (Polly of the Circus), Inspiration Pictures (The Bright Shawl), and Cosmopolitan Pictures (Janice Meredith). Between 1910 and 1937 he exhibited only once (at Knoedler Galleries in 1920), but in later years his work was widely shown.
He died in New York City, not long after a trip to Florida during which he had painted the Ringling Brothers Circus at its winter quarters.
In 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Shinn was small of stature, good-looking, markedly attractive to women, irrepressibly vivacious, and gregarious. He was neat and fastidious about his person and his surroundings, including his usually clean and orderly painting rooms.
He married on June 26, 1898, to Florence Scovel, whose family was related to the Philadelphia Biddles. Shinn's first marriage ended in divorce in 1912. He married Corinne Baldwin in 1913; they had two children. After a second divorce in 1921, Shinn in 1924 married the actress Gertrude McManus Chase, whom he met while working in motion pictures; they were divorced in 1932. He married twenty-one-year-old Paula Downing in 1933; they were divorced in 1942.