William Glackens was born Philadelphia.Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Glackens's paintings received wide recognition. The late paintings include imposing nudes, flower pieces, and portraits of members of his family. Basically impressionistic but with a strong sense of structure, these paintings combine sumptuous color, spontaneity of handling, and an increasingly architectural sense of compositional organization in a decidedly contemporary manner. His illustrations exhibit brilliant and expressive draftsmanship, as do a smaller series of etchings of urban subjects. He was not a radical technically; his work was gay, pleasant, and elegant.