The Winter Art Show

Every morning hundreds of cavalrymen take their horses bathing in the bay. Tampa Bay. It makes a very spirited scene … naked cavalrymen mounted on horse, dashing around in the water.” So wrote the artist-reporter William Glackens in 1898 while covering the war in Cuba for McClure’s magazine, the last commercial assignment he accepted. Here his reporter’s power of observation and classic art training teamed for delightful results. While the arrangement of anatomies comes out of the Renaissance school by way of Degas, Glackens describes the scene with a vigorous, journalistic clarity.