In "American Visions", the critic Robert Hughes praised Sloan's art for "an honest humaneness, a frank sympathy, a refusal to flatten its figures into stereotypes of class misery ... He saw his people as part of larger totality, the carnal and cozy body of the city itself." In "American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression", art historian Milton Brown called Sloan "the outstanding figure of the Ash Can School." To his friend, the painter John Butler Yeats, and to art critic Henry McBride, he was "an American Hogarth."