A native of Philadelphia, John Sloan’s training at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and his experience as an artist-reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer served him well when he moved to New York in 1904. The bustling city streets and crowded tenements supplied the artist with stimulating new subject matter, as seen in this work, which depicts bundled-up pedestrians on a snowy evening at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-Third Street. Recalling the chilly evening in which he sketched this scene, Sloan later commented, “The realization of my surroundings had been frozen in my memory, but I feel that my suffering has been compensated for.”
