On the day classes began at Robert Henri’s new art school in New York, a procession of students toting paint boxes and canvases paraded down Broadway from the New York School of Art on 80th Street to the Lincoln Arcade on Broadway (site of the present-day Lincoln Center). The year was 1909, and the roster of students included such soon-to-be illustrious names as Andrew Dasburg, Clara Greenleaf Perry, Julius Golz, Bernard Karfiol, Walter Pach, Patrick Henry Bruce, Paul Manship, Morgan Russell and Eugene Speicher. The event marked a sea change in the world of art pedagogy, because the New York School of Art had been founded in 1896 by Henri’s great rival, the older and more conservative William Merritt Chase, for whom he had worked. When Henri defected from Chase’s school, he took the talent with him.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chase and Henri emerged as the most influential art teachers in this country. Each taught for three-and-a-half decades at a variety of schools: Chase beginning in 1878 at The Art Students League of New York, then at the Shinnecock Summer School on Long Island, which he founded, followed by the Chase School of Art (later renamed the New York School of Art) and finally, again at the League. Henri’s teaching career began in 1892 at Philadelphia’s School of Design for Women, then progressed through the New York School of Art, Henri School of Art, the Ferrer Center and The Art Students League.

While each man was extremely successful in fashioning a following, they were exact opposites in both appearance and in the philosophy of art. While Chase, short and round, was a dapper dresser who sported a top hat, pince-nez glasses, winged collar, a gardenia in his lapel and white spats, Henri, more than 6 feet tall and slender, regularly wore a calico shirt, black cloth coat and pants that sometimes revealed worn spots at the knees. In the classroom Chase encouraged his legions by such pronouncements as, “Subject is not important. Anything can be made attractive. Aim to make an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you’ve done it.”

Henri, in a more dramatic and sometimes even poetic approach, would say, “Regard the head as a gesture. Often the rise of the forehead is as though it was a surprise. Feel the sweep back under the eyebrow. A pair of lips is not enough. It takes all the lower part of the face to make a mouth.” On another occasion he would say: “Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. Work with great speed. Have your energies up and active. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, who enrolled in Chase’s still life class at The Art Students League, remained indebted to him for his early encouragement: “I think that Chase as a personality [promoted] individuality and gave a sense of style and freedom to his students. There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun. To interest him, the paintings had to [possess] a kind of dash and ‘go’ that kept us looking for something lively.”

Another pupil, Charles Hargens Jr. described him as “an electric spark shooting his words like darts at you.” Other students of Chase included Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Charles Hawthorne, Reynolds and Gifford Beal, Howard Chandler Christy, Marsden Hartley, Edwin Dickinson, Morton Shamberg, Alfred Maurer, Arthur B. Carles and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Chase hired Henri as an instructor at the New York School of Art in 1902, and during the next few years numerous students who had previously been taught by Chase switched their allegiance to Henri. Among them were Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper, C.K. Chatterton and Rockwell Kent.