As someone who painted city crowds and tenement rooms, shop girls and streetwalkers, charwomen and hairdressers, Sloan is one of the artists most closely identified with the Ashcan School. Yet it was a term Sloan despised. He came to feel that it homogenized too many different painters, concentrated viewers' attention on content rather than style, and presupposed a muckraking intent. His wariness was not misplaced: exhibitions of Ashcan art in recent decades often stress its documentary quality and importance as part of an historical record, whereas Sloan felt that any artist worth anything had to be appreciated for his skilled brushwork, color, and composition.