William Glackens was born in 1870 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his family had lived for many generations. He was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American art. He is also known for his work in helping Albert C. Barnes to acquire the European paintings that form the nucleus of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. William had two siblings: an older sister, Ada, and an older brother, cartoonist and illustrator Louis Glackens. He graduated from the prestigious Central High School in 1890. Throughout his school years, he showed a great interest in and aptitude for drawing and drafting.

His dark-hued, vibrantly
painted street scenes and
depictions of daily life in pre-
WW I New York and Paris
first established his
reputation as a major artist.
His later work was brighter in
tone and showed the strong
influence of Renoir. During
much of his career as a
painter, Glackens also worked
as an illustrator for
newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.

After graduation, Glackens became an
artist-reporter for The Philadelphia
Record.[3] In 1892, he left that
newspaper and began illustrating for the
Philadelphia Press. He enrolled in
evening classes at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, studying
under the renowned realist Thomas
Anshutz.

John Sloan also attended the Academy, and he introduced Glackens to Robert Henri, a talented painter and charismatic figure in Philadelphia art circles. Henri played host to regular artists' gatherings at his studio, occasions to socialize, drink, sketch, talk about art, and give artistic criticism of one another's work. [5] Henri urged the young men he brought together to read Whitman and Emerson, William Morris Hunt's Talks on Art and George Moore's Modern Painting, and to think about the need to create a vigorous new American art that spoke to their time and experience. These gatherings were the inspirational beginning of what became known as the Ashcan school of American art, a style that rejected the formality and gentility of 19th-century academic art and looked to working-class and middle-class metropolitan life for its material.