John Sloan – Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair [1912]

Sloan’s painting features working women grooming themselves on a city rooftop. Rather than engaging in polite rituals in the elegant or exotic private habitats that American academics and Impressionists preferred to portray, these lightly clad Three Graces exhibit an easy camaraderie and a forthright relationship to the viewer. They display their chests and bare arms as they perform their toilette, and their hair is freed from the decorous buns, “psyche knots,” and other coiffures required for appropriate appearance in public. Sloan (American, 1871 – 1951) later described these women as unselfconscious performers in “another of the human comedies which were regularly staged for my enjoyment by the humble roof-top players of Cornelia Street,” referring to the view from his studio on Sixth Avenue at West Fourth Street.

[Oil on canvas, 66.4 x 81.6 cm]