Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School arrives at an opportune time, anticipating the centennial of the notorious 1908 exhibition, Eight American Painters, at New York City's MacBeth Galleries. Organized in protest against the conservatism of the authoritative National Academy of Design, this exhibition promoted the work of most of the six leading members of the so-called "Ashcan School"-Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, George Bellows, George Luks, and John Sloan-whose notebook sketches, commercial illustrations, and fine art serve as the basis of Rebecca Zurier's study. With the approach of 2008, Zurier's book joins a substantial amount of scholarly attention directed toward the Ashcan artists and their contemporaries, including two exhibitions and their accompanying catalogs: Seeing the City: Sloan's New York, organized by the Delaware Art Museum and traveling to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, and the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem; and Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush With Leisure, 1895-1925, organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and traveling to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and the New-York Historical Society in New York City. While hosting Life's Pleasures, the New-York Historical Society will also sponsor an academic symposium at which Zurier will present her work on the Ashcan school.'