During a period of time when portraiture was confined to the aristocracy, George Luks is best
remembered by art historians for his portraits of poor women.  Notes John Loughery, “What
really distinguishes Luks from the many other artists who have been lumped under the same
heading [realists] was his singular attitude toward urban women, particularly poor and old
women.”  Luks endowed these women with the same dignity one finds in a Francois Millet or a
Frans Hals.  He is considered to be the most “Ashcan” of the group known as the Eight, whose
1908 exhibition at the MacBeth Gallery in New York protested the National Academy’s control
over contemporary exhibitions.

Luks began his art career as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under the
direction of the painter Robert Anshutz . Luks continued his art training in Dusseldorf, Paris and
London, returning to America in 1894.  Like William Glackens, another member of the Eight who
also studied under Anshutz, Luks worked as an illustrator at the Philadelphia Press, where he
met Everett Shinn and John Sloan.  In 1896 he moved to New York to illustrate the popular
comic strip, “Hogan’s Alley.”  This tale of prank-playing tenement children was the precursor to
the modern comic.  Luks work of this period, roughly 1900-1910, has been said to have  an “inner
urgency,”  that is reminiscent of Francesco Goya’s subjects.  That energy diminished in the later
works of the 1920s and 1930s, along with the artist’s health.

(Williamsport, Pennsylvania, 1867 – 1933, New York City)