One January night, John Sloan and a boozy group climbed to the top of Greenwich Village’s Washington Arch. According to Sloan, they toted balloons, candles, food baskets, wine, a pot for boiling water, and the makings of a campfire. Fictionalized or not, No one contradicted Sloan’s t in the etching, and only he remembered that the balloons fluttered over the Arch for a week. It was a private joke.
The evening was great fun for Sloan.
Afterward, Gertrude Drick, one of the picnickers, concocted and circulated a parody of the Declaration of Independence retitled “Declaration of Independence of the Greenwich Republic, January 23, 1917.” It’s uncertain if that is the night of the picnic or when she wrote it. Sloan and other conspirators signed it, and the date was accepted as written.
See Peter Morse and Jacob Kainen. John Sloan’s Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings, Lithographs, and Posters. 1969. 2 ed. San Francisco Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 2001. Michael Lobel. John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Featured Image: Gertrude Drick, the purported instigator, is the central seated figure (poet/painter, seated). The other picnickers are Sloan (far left serving hot dogs sandwiches); Charles Ellis (actor), Allen Mann (actor, seated and drinking from a bottle), Marcel Duchamp (artist, standing), Allen Russell (seated with eyeglasses), and Betty Turner (actor, seated).