Earl Shinn

Earl Shinn (November 8, 1838 – November 3, 1886) was an American art critic and art historian who often wrote under the pseudonym "Edward Strahan."

Shinn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest child of a middle-class Quaker family. After attending Westtown School, an orthodox Quaker school in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Shinn worked for several years as a conveyancer in Philadelphia. In 1859 he took his first step toward a career in art by enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. He remained at the Academy until 1863 (presumably declining to serve in the Union army because of his religious beliefs). The following year, Shinn moved to New York City and worked as a staff writer for the weekly publication Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

In April 1866, after having returned to Philadelphia as a result of his parents' deaths the summer before, Shinn, accompanied by his sculptor friend Howard Roberts, traveled to France with the goal of continuing his studies in drawing and painting at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When he arrived in Paris later that spring, the school had suspended its enrollment of foreign students. He and Roberts connected with Robert Wylie, a former curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts living in Paris, who convinced the two of them to join him that summer in Pont-Aven, a village on the Breton coast that would later become a destination for Paul Gauguin and other Post-Impressionists. Despite expressing doubts about his abilities as a painter in a letter to his sister, Shinn resumed his efforts to gain admittance to the École des Beaux-Arts upon his return to Paris that fall and was finally successful, thanks, according to Shinn, to the persistent cajoling of government officials by Thomas Eakins, another young Philadelphia painter who overlapped with Shinn at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Shinn studied at the Ecole for a little over one year in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a well-regarded painter of classical and Oriental scenes. Shinn returned to Philadelphia in spring of 1868.

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