The Rathskeller (1901): Art, History and Details

The Rathskeller (1901) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Sloan (American, 1871–1951).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Economic differences infuse Sloan’s scene of patrons at a Philadelphia bar. Here, a working-class woman sharing a beer with a companion captures the attention of a lone man who has ordered the more costly champagne. One contemporary critic characterized this wealthier man as “a spider watching for the fly.”

Object facts

• Title: The Rathskeller
• Date: 1901
• Creator attribution: John Sloan (American, 1871–1951)
• Culture: America, early 20th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 110.6 x 89.2 x 7 cm (43 9/16 x 35 1/8 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 90.5 x 69 cm (35 5/8 x 27 3/16 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1946.164

A detail from the museum

Sloan worked as an illustrator for various newspapers before becoming a professional painter and printmaker.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William Mathewson. In Memoriam: Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. [Cleveland]: [Cleveland Museum of Art], 1958.
• “A Check List. American Paintings and Water Colors of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 1 (January 1973): 21–35.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.