A social realist painter’s captivating study of consumerism and class in Gilded Age New York

William Glackens, a social realist painter and founding member of the Ashcan School, didn’t have to go far for the subjects and setting of his 1907-1908 painting, The Shoppers. The woman in the center is his wife, Edith. She’s interacting with three friends in a department store, perhaps Wanamaker’s, which opened on Broadway and Astor Place in the early 1900s, near the Glackens’ West Ninth Street home in Greenwich Village. Wanamaker’s, like A.T. Stewart’s Iron Palace, Arnold Constable, and Lord & Taylor, was one of the massive fashion emporiums that capitalized on the mass production of goods to transform consumerism into a leisure activity for women of means during the Gilded Age. Edith cooly assesses a garment, with one seated friend turned away and the other (Florence Shinn, wife of fellow Ashcan painter Everett Shinn) staring directly at the viewer—perhaps wanting to catch the eye of the viewer and be a spectacle in her satiny, draping coat and fur muff. Glackens is responding to…

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