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Earl Shinn (November 8, 1838 – November 3, 1886) was an Americanart critic andart historian who often wrote under the pseudonym "Edward Strahan."
Shinn was born inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest child of a middle-classQuaker family. After attendingWesttown School, anorthodoxQuaker school inChester County, Pennsylvania, Shinn worked for several years as aconveyancer inPhiladelphia. In 1859 he took his first step toward a career in art by enrolling in thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. He remained at the academy until 1863 (presumably declining to serve in theUnion army because of his religious beliefs). The following year, Shinn moved to New York City and worked as a staff writer for the weekly publicationFrank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
In April 1866, after having returned toPhiladelphia as a result of his parents' deaths the summer before, Shinn, accompanied by his sculptor friendHoward Roberts, traveled to France with the goal of continuing his studies in drawing and painting at theÉcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When he arrived in Paris later that spring, the school had suspended its enrollment of foreign students. He and Roberts connected with Robert Wylie, a former curator at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts living in Paris, who convinced the two of them to join him that summer inPont-Aven, a village on theBreton coast that would later become a destination forPaul Gauguin and otherPost-Impressionists. Despite expressing doubts about his abilities as a painter in a letter to his sister, Shinn resumed his efforts to gain admittance to theÉcole des Beaux-Arts upon his return to Paris that fall and was finally successful, thanks, according to Shinn, to the persistent cajoling of government officials byThomas Eakins, another youngPhiladelphia painter who overlapped with Shinn at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Shinn studied at the Ecole for a little over one year in the atelier ofJean-Léon Gérôme, a well-regarded painter of classical and Oriental scenes. Shinn returned toPhiladelphia in spring of 1868.
Shinn's doubts about his painting abilities never left him during his time in France. By the end of his studies at the Ecole, he had resolved that his would not be the life of a painter, thanks in large part, it seems, to his poor eyesight. He wrote to his sister in 1867, "Art I should like, and I have a vocation for it; but I think my near-sightedness, color-blindness and failing vision are pretty strong hints from nature that that career is not intended for me..."[1] Already in summer of 1866, while he was inPont-Aven, Shinn looked again to writing for newspapers and magazines. He wrote regular pieces about his experiences there for thePhiladelphia Evening Bulletin and had two similar pieces published by the fledgling magazineThe Nation. In 1869, in the United States again, Shinn wrote a series of articles about his experiences at the École des Beaux-Arts forThe Nation, cementing his relationship with the magazine's founding editor,E.L. Godkin. By this time he was living in New York again, where he would principally reside until his death.
Shinn spent several months inPhiladelphia in 1872 to write a series of ten articles forLippincott's Magazine on privateart collections of wealthy Philadelphians, the start of an increasingly all-consuming interest of his in privateart collections. After returning to New York, he continued to contribute art criticism toThe Nation and took the helm as art editor of the magazine from 1874 to 1879. From 1879 to 1884, Shinn contributed semi-regularly to the magazineThe Art Amateur. He usually wrote anonymously or included his initials at the end of his articles. Shinn saw as the principal aim of art the instruction of the public and the elevation of public taste and often championed in his writing the public art institutions that were being established in the years following theAmerican Civil War, such as theMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York and theCorcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
During the 1870s and 1880s, Shinn wrote a number of books on art (under the pseudonym "Edward Strahan"), including a catalogue of the art gallery at the 1876Centennial Exhibition inPhiladelphia and a retrospective of the work of his former instructor Jean-Léon Gérôme. His most famous works are the two multi-volume publications he wrote on the private art collections of wealthyAmericans:The Art Treasures of America (published as a serial between 1879 and 1882) andMr. Vanderbilt's House and Collection (published, again as a serial, between 1883 and 1884), in which he reviewed the art collection atWilliam Henry Vanderbilt's New York mansion. Perhaps more than any other contemporary work, these two books shed light on the tastes and collecting habits of Americanart collectors in theGilded Age.
Shinn was also a member of theTile Club, a group of New York artists and writers whose membership includedWinslow Homer,William Merritt Chase, andAugustus Saint-Gaudens. He wrote the first two chapters ofA Book of the Tile Club before his death in New York in 1886.
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