Eric Sloane, N.A. (1905 - 1985)

Biography

Born Everard Jean Hinrichs in New York City in 1905, Eric Sloane was the son of a prominent meat broker. After his mother died when he was a young teen, his father remarried. Eric had an unbearable home life with the new family. One of his escapes was to the home of his neighbor, Fred Goudy, who designed typefaces for printing. From Goudy, he learned to form and write typefaces, and eventually paint signs. This was one of the ways many American artists started their early careers. Fine lettering became an invaluable foundation for Everard and his future as a fine artist.

In 1924, young Everard drove his father's twin-six Packard roadster west. He made it as far as Ohio before selling the car for fifty dollars and setting out on foot painting signs on barns, store signs, and windows to pay for his travels. Somewhere in the journey he acquired a Model T Ford, which aided his travels. He ventured across Amish country in Pennsylvania down to New Orleans, then on to Taos, New Mexico. Sloane actually wrote different versions of his trip in the various books he authored. He justified this by saying, "my memory will often embellish some aspects." By the age of twenty, his art career had begun. His first works were in pen and ink; soon after, in Taos, he was encouraged to try oil paints by the Russian-American painter, Leon Gaspard.

Traveling back to New York in his Model T the following year, Everard wrote about the sky and decided to make meteorology and sky painting his life's work. What should have been a fifteen-day return trip, took nearly a month. Back home, the young artist spent time painting numbers on planes at Floyd Bennett Field, making signs and anything artistic to pay for his pursuit of art. In 1929, he attended the Yale School of Fine Arts and the following year he joined the Art Students League in New York City. During his studies in 1930, he was influenced by John Sloan and George Luks at the Art Students League. He took to heart their discussion of how they each wished they had used a different painting name during their development years, thus preventing early paintings of poor quality to be attached to their true names. From this discussion came the pseudonym, Eric Sloane. "Eric" was derived from the center of the word America, and "Sloane" was the last name of his mentor, John Sloan, with an "e" added to the end.

Eric Sloane continued his painting and work around New York City. In 1935, he enrolled in the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. This was one of the many interests developed by the young painter during the 1930s. From flying with famous aviators, whose planes he had lettered, he developed a renewed interest in cloud formations and weather. Often he painted these cloud formations, which led him to the study of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The science and tedious math did not appeal to Sloane, so after the first year, he quit school and relied on old weather books, diaries, and almanacs for additional study. In the pages of these books and magazines he discovered early American farming, antique tools, and eighteenth-century building techniques. The foundations for his future life as a painter were formed from the elements of the sky, rural architecture, and early tools. He even became America's first television weatherman for a very brief time in 1946 on the DuMont station in New York.

Later, in the early 1930s, Sloane moved back to Taos and lived at the guesthouse of Leon Gaspard, a famous painter. Folklore proclaims that he was invited to exhibit a painting with the Taos Society of Artists, turning down the offer after lunching with Gaspard and the famous Russian painter, Nicolai Fechin. Each artist strongly urged him not to associate with illustrators. Eric moved back to New England in 1940, and established his life and career. He visited Taos every year thereafter.

Sloane was blessed with friends and collectors from all walks of life. He knew every U.S. president from FDR to George H. W. Bush. He wrote and conversed with the great authors of our time at the Dutch Treat Club in New York City. They included John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Leon Uris, and a host of others. He sold his first sky painting to Amelia Earhart, flew with Wiley Post and Will Rogers out of Floyd Bennett Field in New York, and established lasting relationships with Doolittle, Lindbergh, and the great aviators of the time. Leonid Brezhnev invited Sloane to show at the U.S.S.R. Academy of the Arts in Moscow during 1974. More than two million Russians viewed the exhibit. Brezhnev himself purchased two paintings for his home. Sloane reprinted his most famous book, I Remember America, for this exhibition. In 1968, he was inducted into the National Academy of Design, America's most important artistic guild.

During his lifetime, Sloane's paintings were permanently collected in more than fifty museums worldwide. He established the Hall of Weather at the American Museum of Natural History. His breathtaking L-shaped mural greets more than two million visitors annually at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, towering 58 feet high and 75 feet in length. In 1987, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame held a Retrospective Exhibition of Eric Sloane with eighty paintings and artifacts from the Estate, graciously compiled and loaned by Mrs. Eric Sloane. The Museum Board of Directors unanimously voted to acquire one of his paintings for their permanent collection, a scene depicting a Taos Morado (an abandoned church), which was signed Eric Sloane and included the initials E.J.H. below his traditional signature. This was one of the few paintings ever noted with the initials from his given name, Everard Jean Hinrichs.

In keeping with the spirit of Eric Sloane, this book will not be a biography about the painter, author, and collector extraordinaire. Sloane covered all of those memories in the countless books he authored. He romanced, exaggerated, and told his audience everything they would ever need to know about himself. Instead, this will be an offering of his paintings, a collection of his random thoughts about his art and observations, an explanation of how and what he painted, and most importantly: a celebration of Eric Sloane.