The group of eight American artists who exhibited together in 1908 was The Eight.
The artists were Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast. They exhibited at the Macbeth Galleries in New York in January 1908 after several members had faced rejection from the conservative National Academy of Design.
The exhibition was less about a single uniform style than about artistic independence. Five members—Henri, Glackens, Luks, Sloan, and Shinn—are closely associated with the urban realism later called the Ashcan school. Davies, Lawson, and Prendergast had noticeably different approaches, so calling all eight Ashcan painters is inaccurate.
A common mix-up is confusing The Eight with the Hudson River School, an earlier landscape movement, or The Ten American Painters, an impressionist group formed in 1898. The Eight’s exhibition helped fuel debate about modern American art and later toured several cities.