High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Ten American Painters, generally known as The Ten, resigned from the Society of American Artists in late 1897 to protest the commercialism of that group`s exhibitions, and their circus-like atmosphere. The Society had broken away from the National Academy of Design in New York City twenty years earlier, in a progressive movement led by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Winslow Homer.