Robert Henri, Walt Whitman, and the American Artist

"I love Walt, and I follow everything that is written about him," painter Robert Henri exclaimed at his first meeting with anarchist Emma Goldman, herself an ardent consumer of Whitman's verse.1 A committed and highly respected teacher of some of the country's most important early twentieth-century artists, Henri articulated a significant place for Whitman within the country's expanding arts community. Whitman's non-elitist, activist posture and his enthusiastic engagement with even the most mundane elements of his urban milieu offered a refreshingly new and democratic perspective far removed from the staid, impersonal standards mandated by the Academy. Particularly important were Whitman's celebration of the self, personality, and the bond between the individual and the community. In striking opposition to the high moral expectations that circulated around nineteenth-century notions of character, the emphasis on personality-what Whitman lauded as "the great pride of man in himself"-shifted the dynamic inward toward the self.2 In 1896, four years after Whitman's death, the naturalist John Burroughs, a member of Whitman's inner circle, boldly characterized the poet as "a new type, rising out of new conditions . . . the new man in the new world." 3 Henri commenced his career in Philadelphia with words like Burroughs's echoing in his ear and throughout his thirtyyear career achieved widespread recognition as a forceful and dynamic interpreter of the creative potential of Whitman's verse for members of the American arts community. Whether in the classroom, in his writings, or in his innovative contributions to the exhibition practices of the day, Henri nurtured and inspired a broad range of artists, many of whom are recognized today for their innovative and provocative contributions to American modernism.4Born in Cincinnati, Henri was raised on the Nebraska frontier where he combined an active outdoor life with a passion for books. But when his father, a gambler and cattleman, shot one of his employees in self-defense, Henri's western life came to an abrupt and untimely end. It was at this point that the Nebraska-bred Robert Henry Cozad reinvented himself as Robert Earle Henri. "Names are the turning point of who shall be master," Whitman advised, and, like Henri, he had enacted his own audacious act of self-mastery at the outset of his poetic career by changing his name from the formal "Walter Whitman, Jr." to the more personable and informal "Walt Whitman."5 Henri's act of self-naming signified a similarly dramatic rupture with the past and a foreshadowing of his artistic future. The name "Henri" constituted a reformulation of his own middle name, but with the French spelling of his ancestors. Although he would later spend considerable time abroad, Henri rejected the name's French pronunciation, preferring the more individualistic and conspicuously American "Hen-rye."6 The aspiring artist in Henri also recognized the name's value as a graphic reinforcement of the act of seeing, for embedded in this Anglo-French hybrid is a homophonic pun on the English word "eye," which Henri wittily acknowledged with his signature on a letter to the wife of his friend John Sloan (Figure 1).Three years into his new identity, Henri enrolled as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Too late to study with Thomas Eakins, whose resignation eight months earlier had deprived the school of an ardent Whitman supporter, Henri, like other artists of his generation, first came to appreciate Whitman's importance both for himself and for American art generally during an extended period of study and travel in Europe. Whitman's reputation in France and throughout much of Western Europe was considerably stronger than in the United States at this time and was already attracting the attention of a growing cadre of writers, artists, and critics.7 Henri was initially drawn more to Emerson than Whitman when he arrived to study at the Academie Julian in September 1888, but spirited conversations with the Canadian artist Ernest Thompson Seton, a fellow student at the Academie, helped shifthis attention toward Whitman. …