Everett Shinn (1876-1953) was an American artists of the early twentieth century, whose vivid depictions of New York City theater life, street scenes, and urban entertainment secured him a beloved place within American realism. Born in Woodstown, New Jersey, Shinn pursued his early artistic training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied alongside William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan, and Robert Henri. This remarkable group of young painters, all working as newspaper illustrators in Philadelphia, would eventually reunite in New York to launch the movement that transformed American painting at the turn of the century.

Shinn became the youngest founding member of The Eight, the loose association of American realists whose landmark 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery announced a new direction in American art. Alongside his colleagues in what would later be called the Ashcan School, Shinn brought the everyday drama of urban New York into serious painting, treating subjects that had previously been considered beneath the dignity of art. His characteristic subjects included the theaters of Broadway and Union Square, vaudeville halls, ballet performances, city street scenes, and occasionally the more difficult subjects of homelessness and urban poverty. His work owed clear debts to Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose theatrical subjects and confident draftsmanship informed Shinn's approach at every level, and he loved pastel as a medium capable of capturing the immediacy of urban performance.

Shinn's practice extended well beyond easel painting. He worked as a magazine illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Ainslee's, and other important publications, and he produced ambitious mural cycles for the Trenton City Hall, the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C., and other public and private spaces. He was also a playwright and theatrical designer, writing plays and designing sets for productions in his own private Waverly Place theater. His four marriages and colorful personal life gave him a genuinely theatrical public persona that matched his artistic subject matter.

Shinn's paintings, pastels, and drawings are held in the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and other major American collections, where they remain among the defining images of turn-of-the-century American urban life.