Du Bois once remarked, “The entire New York world of painting was dominated by William Merritt Chase,” yet after attending Henri’s initial day of instruction, observed that he “set the class in an uproar. Completely overturned the apple cart; displaced art by life, discarded technique. The talk was uncompromising, the approach unsubtle, the result pandemonium.”

Hopper once told me, “Henri was the most influential teacher I had. Men didn’t get much from Chase; there were mostly women in his class. I was in the Life and Portraiture classes of Henri. He was a magnetic teacher.”

Chatterton began his third year at the school in the year Henri arrived, and noted: “Almost from the first moment, Henri became the dominant influence in the school. He urged us to study life around us and to express our own ideas. His teaching seemed revolutionary at the time. We hung on his every word.” And Rockwell Kent, after becoming a Henri student, noted that his critiques “made no pretense to such showmanship as Chase delighted in. They were earnest and, at times, impassioned.”

Like an aesthetic magnet, Henri attracted students from near and far: George Bellows left Ohio State University following his junior year, Carl Sprinchorn arrived directly from Sweden, Glenn Coleman from a newspaper job in Indianapolis, Helen Appleton Read after graduating from Smith College and Margery Ryerson came to Henri’s classes straight from Vassar.

In the fall of 1907 William Merritt Chase left the Chase School of Art and returned to The Art Students League. The New York American announced the story with the headline: “William M. Chase Forced Out of N.Y. Art School; Triumph for the ‘New Movement’ Led by Robert Henri.” The “New Movement,” already infamously labeled the “Ashcan School,” resulted in Henri urging his flock to focus on depicting the hustle, bustle and squalor of Lower Manhattan, where two-thirds of New York lived in crowded slums. Meanwhile, Chase had become part of the genteel tradition created for the middle and upper classes, producing popular portraits of the well-to-do and stunning still lifes of shimmering dead fish.

Although Robert Henri now reigned as the leading teacher at the New York School of Art, his association with it lasted just one more year. Announcing that he was owed some $800 in back pay, Henri left in December 1908 to found his own school, the Henri School of Art. There, he encouraged his flock to create quickly with slashing brushstrokes, and as a result the school’s two rooms were awash with pigment—as Stuart David later recalled, “Paint was all over the place; the students’ smocks were heavily armored with it.”
 
In April, 1912 Henri taught his final class at the school, turning over the reins to student Homer Boss. During the past four years Henri had become increasingly involved in organizing exhibits for all of those artists, including his students and friends, whose subject matter and styles fell outside the purview of the conservative annual exhibitions at the National Academy of Design.