During a recent stay in New York, I walked over to 139 West 10th Street, curious to see where the Italian restaurant depicted in John Sloan’s 1912 painting Renganeschi’s Saturday Night had been located. Sloan lived only two blocks away and is known to have eaten there occasionally, joined at least once by his friend Robert Henri, a fellow artist of the Ashcan School of realist painters. During the early twentieth century, artists and writers living in Greenwich Village were fascinated by their neighbors, often making them the subject of their art.1 Capturing the excitement of the city, Sloan’s painting features three young women sitting around a table on a girls’ night out; it is a scene so familiar that updating the clothing styles would bring it into the present day. In fact, it was fascinating to find that the old building still houses a restaurant, and things had not changed as much as one might have expected.
