Thomas Eakins
Encyclopedia
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist
painter
, photographer, sculptor
, and fine art
s educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art
history.
For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portrait
s, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective.
No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art
. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation.
Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art".
He was an athletic child who enjoyed rowing, ice skating, swimming, wrestling, sailing, and gymnastics—activities he later painted and encouraged in his students. Eakins attended Central High School
, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing. He studied drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
beginning in 1861, and attended courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864-65. For a while, he followed his father's profession and was listed in city directories as a "writing teacher". His scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon. Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, notably in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme
, being only the second American pupil of the French realist painter famous as a master of Orientalism
. He also attended the atelier of Léon Bonnat
, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Eakins. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts
, he seems to have taken scant interest in the new Impressionist movement, nor was he impressed by what he perceived as the classical pretensions of the French Academy. A letter home to his father in 1868 made his aesthetic clear:
Already at age 24, "Nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness in his mind." Yet his desire for truthfulness was more expansive, and the letters home to Philadelphia reveal a passion for realism that included, but was not limited to, the study of the figure.
A trip to Spain for six months confirmed his admiration for the realism of artists such as Diego Velázquez
and Jusepe de Ribera. In Seville
in 1869 he painted Carmelita Requeña, a portrait of a seven year old gypsy dancer more freely and colorfully painted than his Paris studies. That same year he attempted his first large oil painting, A Street Scene in Seville, wherein he first dealt with the complications of a scene observed outside the studio. Although he failed to matriculate and showed no works in the salons, Eakins succeeded in absorbing the techniques and methods of French and Spanish masters, and he began to formulate his artistic vision which he demonstrated in his first major painting upon his return to America. "I shall seek to achieve my broad effect from the very beginning," he declared.
(1871; also known as The Champion Single Sculling). Both his subject and his technique drew attention. His selection of a contemporary sport was "a shock to the artistic conventionalities of the city". Eakins placed himself in the painting, in a scull behind Schmitt, his name inscribed on the boat.
Typically, the work entailed critical observation of the painting's subject, as well as preparatory drawings of the figure and perspective plans of the scull in the water. Its preparation and composition indicates the importance of Eakins' academic training in Paris. It was a completely original conception, true to Eakins' firsthand experience, and an almost startlingly successful image for the artist, who had struggled with his first outdoor composition less than a year before. His first known sale was the watercolor The Sculler (1874). Most critics judged the rowing pictures successful and auspicious, but after the initial flourish, Eakins never revisited the subject of rowing and went on to other sports themes.
At the same time that he made these initial ventures into outdoor themes, Eakins produced a series of domestic Victorian interiors, often with his father, his sisters or friends as the subjects. Home Scene (1871), Elizabeth at the Piano (1875), The Chess Players (1876), and Elizabeth Crowell and her Dog (1874), each dark in tonality, focus on the unsentimental characterization of individuals adopting natural attitudes in their homes. It was in this vein that in 1872 he painted his first large scale portrait, Kathrin, in which the subject, Kathrin Crowell, is seen in dim light, playing with a kitten. In 1874 Eakins and Crowell became engaged; they were still engaged five years later, when Crowell died of meningitis in 1879.
He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876 as a volunteer after the opening of the school's new Frank Furness
designed building, became a salaried professor in 1878, and rose to director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial: there was no drawing from antique casts, and students received only a short study in charcoal, followed quickly by their introduction to painting, in order to grasp subjects in true color as soon as practical. He encouraged students to use photography as an aid to anatomy and the study of motion, and disallowed prize competitions. Although there was no specialized vocational instruction, students with aspirations for using their school training for applied arts, such as illustration, lithography, and decoration, were as welcome as students interested in becoming portrait artists.
Most notable was his interest in the instruction of all aspects of the human figure, including anatomical study of the human and animal body and surgical dissection; there were also rigorous courses in the fundamentals of form, and studies in perspective which involved mathematics. As an aid to the study of anatomy, plaster casts were made from dissections, duplicates of which were furnished to students. A similar study was made of the anatomy of horses; acknowledging Eakins' expertise, in 1891 his friend the sculptor William Rudolf O'Donovan
asked him to collaborate on the commission to create bronze equestrian reliefs of Abraham Lincoln
and Ulysses S. Grant
for the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch in Grand Army Plaza In Brooklyn
.
Owing to Eakins' devotion to working from life, the Academy's course of study was by the early 1880s the most "liberal and advanced in the world". Eakins believed in teaching by example and letting the students find their own way with only terse guidance. His students included painters, cartoonists, and illustrators such as Henry Ossawa Tanner
, Thomas Pollock Anshutz
, Edward Willis Redfield
, Colin Campbell Cooper
, Alice Barber Stephens
, Frederick Judd Waugh
, T. S. Sullivant
and A. B. Frost
.
He stated his teaching philosophy bluntly, "A teacher can do very little for a pupil & should only be thankful if he don’t hinder him ... and the greater the master, mostly the less he can say."
He believed that women should "assume professional privileges" as would men. Life classes and dissection were segregated but women had access to male models (who were nude but for loincloths).
The line between impartiality and questionable behavior was a thin one. When a female student, Amelia Van Buren
, asked about the movement of the pelvis, Eakins invited her to his studio, where he undressed and "gave her the explanation as I could not have done by words only". Such incidents, coupled with the ambitions of his younger associates to oust him and take over the school themselves, created tensions between him and the Academy's board of directors. He was ultimately forced to resign in 1886, for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. Eakins took the dismissal hard. His family was split, with his in-laws siding against him in public dispute. He struggled to protect his name against rumors and false charges, had bouts of ill health, and suffered a humiliation which he felt for the rest of his life.
Eakins' popularity amongst the students was such that a number of them broke with the Academy and formed the Art Students' League of Philadelphia
, where Eakins subsequently instructed. It was there that he met the student, Samuel Murray
, who would become his protege and life-long friend. He also lectured and taught at a number of other schools, including the Art Students League of New York
, the National Academy of Design
, Cooper Union
, and the Art Students' Guild in Washington, D.C., until he withdrew from teaching by 1898.
_-_study_in_the_human_motion.jpg)
Eakins has been credited with having "introduced the camera to the American art studio". During his study abroad, he was exposed to the use of photography by the French realists, though the use of photography was still frowned upon as a shortcut by traditionalists. In the late 1870s he was introduced to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge
, particularly the equine studies, and became interested in using the camera to study sequential movement. He performed his own motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film. Where Muybridge's system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures on one negative. An excellent example is his painting A May Morning in the Park
, which relied heavily on these motion studies to depict the true gait of the four horses pulling the coach of patron Fairman Rogers
. But in typical fashion Eakins also employed wax figures and oil sketches to get the final effect he desired.
After Eakins obtained a camera in 1880, several paintings, such as Mending the Net (1881) and Arcadia (painting) (1883), are known to have been derived at least in part from his photographs. Some figures appear to be detailed transcriptions and tracings from the photographs by some device like a magic lantern, which Eakins took pains to cover up with oil paint. Eakins' methods appear to be meticulously applied, and rather than shortcuts, were likely used in a quest for accuracy and realism. The so-called "Naked Series", which began in 1883, were nude photos of students and professional models which were taken to show real human anatomy from several specific angles, and were often hung up and displayed for study at the school. Later, less regimented poses were taken indoors and out, of men, women, and children, including his wife. The most provocative, and the only ones combining males and females, were nude photos of Eakins and a female model (see below). Although witnesses and chaperones were usually on site, and the poses were mostly traditional in nature, the sheer quantity of the photos and Eakins’ overt display of them may have undermined his standing at the Academy. In all, about eight hundred photographs are now attributed to Eakins and his circle, most of which are figure studies, both clothed and nude, and portraits. No other American artist of his time matched Eakins' interest in photography, nor produced a comparable body of photographic works.
For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization or even simple verisimilitude—it provided the opportunity to reveal the character of an individual through the modeling of solid anatomical form. This meant that, notwithstanding his youthful optimism, he would never be a commercially successful portrait painter. Few commissions came his way. But his total output of some two hundred and fifty portraits is characterized by "an uncompromising search for the unique human being".
Often this search for individuality required that the subject be painted in his working environment. His Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand
(1874) was a prelude to what many consider his most important work. In The Gross Clinic
(1875), a renowned Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel D. Gross
, is seen presiding over an operation to remove part of a diseased bone from a patient's thigh. Gross lectures in an amphitheater crowded with students at Jefferson Medical College. Eakins spent nearly a year on the painting, again choosing a novel subject, the discipline of modern surgery, in which Philadelphia was in the forefront. He initiated the project and may have had the goal of a grand work befitting a showing at the Centennial Exposition
of 1876. Though rejected for the Art Gallery, the painting was shown on the centennial grounds at an exhibit of a U.S. Army Post Hospital. In sharp contrast, The Chess Players was accepted by the Committee and was much admired at the Centennial Exhibition, and critically praised.
At 96 by 78 inches, The Gross Clinic is one of the artist's largest works, and considered by some to be his greatest. Eakins was elated by the project and stated that "it is very far better than anything I have ever done". But if Eakins hoped to impress his home town with the picture, he was to be disappointed; public reaction to the painting of a realistic surgical incision and the resultant blood was ambivalent at best, and it was finally purchased by the college for the unimpressive sum of $200. Eakins borrowed it for subsequent exhibitions, where it drew strong reactions, such as that of the New York Daily Tribune, which both acknowledged and damned its powerful image, "but the more one praises it, the more one must condemn its admission to a gallery where men and women of weak nerves must be compelled to look at it. For not to look it is impossible...No purpose is gained by this morbid exhibition, no lesson taught—the painter shows his skill and the spectators' gorge rises at it—that is all." The college now describes it thus: "Today the once maligned picture is celebrated as a great nineteenth-century medical history painting, featuring one of the most superb portraits in American art".
In 1876, Eakins completed a portrait of Dr. John Brinton, surgeon of the Philadelphia Hospital, and famed for his Civil War
service. Done in a more informal setting than The Gross Clinic
, it was a personal favorite of Eakins, and The Art Journal
proclaimed "it is in every respect a more favorable example of this artist's abilities than his much-talked-of composition representing a dissecting room." Other outstanding examples of his portraits include The Agnew Clinic
(1889), Eakins' most important commission and largest painting, which depicted another eminent American surgeon, Dr. David Hayes Agnew
, performing a mastectomy; The Dean's Roll Call (1899), featuring Dr. James W. Holland, and Professor Leslie W. Miller (1901), portraits of educators standing as if addressing an audience; a portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing
(ca. 1895), in which the prominent ethnologist is seen performing an incantation in a Zuñi pueblo; Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897), a brilliant scientist whose study of spectroscopy revolutionized his field; Antiquated Music (1900), in which Mrs. William D. Frishmuth is shown seated amidst her collection of musical instruments; and The Concert Singer
(1890–92), for which Eakins asked Weda Cook to sing "O rest in the Lord", so that he could study the muscles of her throat and mouth. In order to replicate the proper deployment of a baton, Eakins enlisted an orchestra conductor to pose for the hand seen in the lower left-hand corner of the painting.
Of Eakins' later portraits, many took as their subjects women who were friends or students. Unlike most portrayals of women at the time, they are devoid of glamor and idealization. For Portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan (1888), Eakins painted the sitter wearing the same evening dress in which he had seen her at a party. She is a substantial presence, a vision quite different from the era's fashionable portraiture. So, too, his Portrait of Maud Cook
(1895), where the obvious beauty of the subject is noted with "a stark objectivity".
The portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren
(ca. 1890), a friend and former pupil, suggests the melancholy of a complex personality, and has been called "the finest of all American portraits". Even Susan Macdowell Eakins
, a strong painter and former student who married Eakins in 1884, was not sentimentalized: despite its richness of color, The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog (ca. 1884-89) is a penetratingly candid portrait.
Some of his most vivid portraits resulted from a late series done for the Catholic clergy, which included paintings of a cardinal, archbishops, bishops, and monsignors. As usual, most of the sitters were engaged at Eakins' request, and were given the portraits when Eakins had completed them. In portraits of His Eminence Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli (1902), Archbishop William Henry Elder (1903), and Monsignor James P. Turner (ca. 1906), Eakins took advantage of the brilliant vestments of the offices to animate the compositions in a way not possible in his other male portraits.
Deeply affected by his dismissal from the Academy, Eakins's later career focused on portraiture, such as his 1905 Portrait of Professor William S. Forbes. His steadfast insistence on his own vision of realism, in addition to his notoriety from his school scandals, combined to hurt his income in later years. Even as he approached these portraits with the skill of a highly trained anatomist, what is most noteworthy is the intense psychological presence of his sitters. However, it was precisely for this reason that his portraits were often rejected by the sitters or their families. As a result, Eakins came to rely on his friends and family members to model for portraits. His portrait of Walt Whitman
(1887–1888) was the poet's favorite.
In the 1877 painting William Rush and His Model
, he painted the female nude as integral to a historical subject, even though there is no evidence that the model who posed for Rush did so in the nude. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 helped foster a revival in interest in Colonial America and Eakins participated with an ambitious project employing oil studies, wax and wood models, and finally the portrait in 1877. William Rush
was a celebrated Colonial sculptor and ship carver, a revered example of an artist-citizen who figured prominently in Philadelphia civic life, and a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where Eakins had started teaching. Despite his sincerely depicted reverence for Rush, Eakins' treatment of the human body once again drew criticism. This time it was the nude model and her heaped-up clothes depicted front and center, with Rush relegated to the deep shadows in the left background, that stirred dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, Eakins found a subject which referenced his native city, an earlier Philadelphia artist, and allowed for an assay on the female nude seen from behind. When he returned to the subject many years later, the narrative became more personal: In William Rush and His Model (1908), gone are the chaperon and detailed interior of the earlier work. The professional distance between sculptor and model has been eliminated, and the relationship has become intimate. In one version of the painting from that year, the nude is seen from the front, being helped down from the model stand by an artist who bears a strong resemblance to Eakins.
The Swimming Hole
(1884-5) features Eakins' finest studies of the nude, in his most successfully constructed outdoor picture. The figures are those of his friends and students, and include a self-portrait. Although there are photographs by Eakins which relate to the painting, the picture's powerful pyramidal composition and sculptural conception of the individual bodies are completely distinctive pictorial resolutions. The work was painted on commission, but was refused.
In the late 1890s Eakins returned to the male figure, this time in a more urban setting. Taking the Count (1896), a painting of a prizefight, was his second largest canvas, but not his most successful composition. The same may be said of Wrestlers
(1899). More successful was Between Rounds (1899), for which boxer Billy Smith posed seated in his corner at Philadelphia's Arena; in fact, all the principal figures were posed by models re-enacting what had been an actual fight. Salutat
(1898), a frieze-like composition in which the main figure is isolated, "is one of Eakins' finest achievements in figure-painting."
In his later years Eakins persistently asked his female portrait models to pose in the nude, a practice which would have been all but prohibited in conventional Philadelphia society. Inevitably, his desires were frustrated.
, one of his students at the Academy, in 1884. She was the fifth of eight children of a Philadelphia engraver, well known in the artistic community.
She was 25 when Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery where "The Gross Clinic" was being exhibited in 1875. Unlike many, she was impressed by the controversial painting and she decided to study with him at the Academy, which she attended for 6 years, adopting a sober, realistic style similar to her teacher's. She was an outstanding student and winner of the Mary Smith prize for the best painting by a matriculating woman artist.
After their childless marriage, she only painted sporadically and spent most of her time supporting her husband's career, entertaining guests and students, and faithfully backing him in his difficult times with the Academy, even when some members of her family aligned against Eakins.
She and Eakins both shared a passion for photography, both as photographers and subjects, and employed it as a tool for their art. She also posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him. Both had separate studios in their home.
After his death in 1916, she returned to painting, adding considerably to her output right up to the 1930s, in a style that became warmer, looser, and brighter in tone. She died in 1938. Thirty-five years after her death, in 1973, she had her first one-woman exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
. In 1914 the sale of a portrait study of D. Hayes Agnew for The Agnew Clinic to Dr. Albert C. Barnes
precipitated much publicity when rumors circulated that the selling price was fifty thousand dollars. In fact, Barnes bought the painting for four thousand dollars.
In the year after his death Eakins was honored with a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
, and in 1917-18 the Pennsylvania Academy followed suit. Susan Macdowell Eakins did much to preserve his reputation, including gifting the Philadelphia Museum of Art
with more than fifty of her husband's oil paintings. After her death in 1938, other works were sold off, and eventually another large collection of art and personal material was purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn
, and now is part of the Hirshhorn Museum's collection. Since then, Eakins' home in North Philadelphia
was put on the National Register of Historic Places
list in 1966, and Eakins Oval
, across from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
, was named for the artist. In 1967 The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872) was reproduced on a United States postage stamp
.
Eakins's attitude toward realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life proved influential. He taught hundreds of students, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell, African-American painter
Henry Ossawa Tanner
, and Thomas Anshutz
, who taught, in turn, Robert Henri
, George Luks
, John Sloan
, and Everett Shinn
, future members of the Ashcan School
, and other realists
and artistic heirs to Eakins' philosophy. Though his is not a household name, and though during his lifetime Eakins struggled to make a living from his work, today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period.
Since the 1990s, Eakins has emerged as a major figure in sexuality studies in art history, for both the homoeroticism
of his male nudes and for the complexity of his attitudes toward women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was accused of abusing female students. Recent scholarship suggests that these scandals were grounded in more than the "puritanical prudery" of his contemporaries— as had once been assumed— and that Eakins's progressive academic principles may have protected unconscious and dubious agendas. These controversies may have been caused by a combination of factors such as the bohemianism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), the intensity and authority of his teaching style, and Eakins's inclination toward unorthodox or provocative behavior.
On November 11, 2006 the Board of Trustees at Thomas Jefferson University
agreed to sell The Gross Clinic to the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C., and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas
for a record $68,000,000, the highest price for an Eakins painting as well as a record price for an individual American-made portrait. On December 21, 2006, a group of donors agreed to pay $68,000,000 in order to keep the painting in Philadelphia. It is displayed alternately at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
wrote an open letter to the Art Students League
about Eakins:
In 1982, in his two-volume Eakins biography, art historian Lloyd Goodrich
wrote:
John Canaday
, art critic for The New York Times
, wrote in 1964:
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, photographer, sculptor
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, and fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
s educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art
Visual arts of the United States
American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement,...
history.
For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
s, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective.
No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art
Visual arts of the United States
American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement,...
. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation.
Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art".
Youth
Eakins was born and lived most of his life in Philadelphia. He was the first child of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, a woman of English and Dutch descent, and Benjamin Eakins, a writing master and calligraphy teacher of Scots-Irish ancestry. Benjamin Eakins grew up on a farm in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the son of a weaver. He was successful in his chosen profession, and moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s to raise his family. Thomas Eakins observed his father at work and by twelve demonstrated skill in precise line drawing, perspective, and the use of a grid to lay out a careful design, skills he later applied to his art.Central High School (Philadelphia)
Central High School is a public secondary school in the Logan section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Central, the second-oldest continuously public high school in the United States , was founded in 1836 and is a four-year university preparatory magnet school...
, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing. He studied drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
beginning in 1861, and attended courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864-65. For a while, he followed his father's profession and was listed in city directories as a "writing teacher". His scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon. Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, notably in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.-Life:Jean-Léon Gérôme was born...
, being only the second American pupil of the French realist painter famous as a master of Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
. He also attended the atelier of Léon Bonnat
Léon Bonnat
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat was a French painter.He was born in Bayonne, but from 1846 to 1853 he lived in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop. While tending his father's shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing...
, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Eakins. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
, he seems to have taken scant interest in the new Impressionist movement, nor was he impressed by what he perceived as the classical pretensions of the French Academy. A letter home to his father in 1868 made his aesthetic clear:
- She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited... It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation.
Already at age 24, "Nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness in his mind." Yet his desire for truthfulness was more expansive, and the letters home to Philadelphia reveal a passion for realism that included, but was not limited to, the study of the figure.
A trip to Spain for six months confirmed his admiration for the realism of artists such as Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
and Jusepe de Ribera. In Seville
Seville
Seville is the artistic, historic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level...
in 1869 he painted Carmelita Requeña, a portrait of a seven year old gypsy dancer more freely and colorfully painted than his Paris studies. That same year he attempted his first large oil painting, A Street Scene in Seville, wherein he first dealt with the complications of a scene observed outside the studio. Although he failed to matriculate and showed no works in the salons, Eakins succeeded in absorbing the techniques and methods of French and Spanish masters, and he began to formulate his artistic vision which he demonstrated in his first major painting upon his return to America. "I shall seek to achieve my broad effect from the very beginning," he declared.
Early career
Eakins's first works upon his return from Europe included a large group of rowing scenes, eleven oils and watercolors in all, of which the first and most famous is Max Schmitt in a Single ScullMax Schmitt in a Single Scull
Max Schmitt in a Single Scull is an 1871 painting by Thomas Eakins in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
(1871; also known as The Champion Single Sculling). Both his subject and his technique drew attention. His selection of a contemporary sport was "a shock to the artistic conventionalities of the city". Eakins placed himself in the painting, in a scull behind Schmitt, his name inscribed on the boat.
At the same time that he made these initial ventures into outdoor themes, Eakins produced a series of domestic Victorian interiors, often with his father, his sisters or friends as the subjects. Home Scene (1871), Elizabeth at the Piano (1875), The Chess Players (1876), and Elizabeth Crowell and her Dog (1874), each dark in tonality, focus on the unsentimental characterization of individuals adopting natural attitudes in their homes. It was in this vein that in 1872 he painted his first large scale portrait, Kathrin, in which the subject, Kathrin Crowell, is seen in dim light, playing with a kitten. In 1874 Eakins and Crowell became engaged; they were still engaged five years later, when Crowell died of meningitis in 1879.
Teaching and dismissal from Academy
Frank Furness
Frank Heyling Furness was an acclaimed American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his eclectic, muscular, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan...
designed building, became a salaried professor in 1878, and rose to director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial: there was no drawing from antique casts, and students received only a short study in charcoal, followed quickly by their introduction to painting, in order to grasp subjects in true color as soon as practical. He encouraged students to use photography as an aid to anatomy and the study of motion, and disallowed prize competitions. Although there was no specialized vocational instruction, students with aspirations for using their school training for applied arts, such as illustration, lithography, and decoration, were as welcome as students interested in becoming portrait artists.
Most notable was his interest in the instruction of all aspects of the human figure, including anatomical study of the human and animal body and surgical dissection; there were also rigorous courses in the fundamentals of form, and studies in perspective which involved mathematics. As an aid to the study of anatomy, plaster casts were made from dissections, duplicates of which were furnished to students. A similar study was made of the anatomy of horses; acknowledging Eakins' expertise, in 1891 his friend the sculptor William Rudolf O'Donovan
William Rudolf O'Donovan
William Rudolf O'Donovan was a self-taught American sculptor, born in Preston County, Virginia. After the Civil War, in which he served in the Confederate army, he opened a studio in New York City and became a well-known sculptor, especially of memorial pieces...
asked him to collaborate on the commission to create bronze equestrian reliefs of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
and Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th President of the United States as well as military commander during the Civil War and post-war Reconstruction periods. Under Grant's command, the Union Army defeated the Confederate military and ended the Confederate States of America...
for the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch in Grand Army Plaza In Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
.
Owing to Eakins' devotion to working from life, the Academy's course of study was by the early 1880s the most "liberal and advanced in the world". Eakins believed in teaching by example and letting the students find their own way with only terse guidance. His students included painters, cartoonists, and illustrators such as Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.-Education:...
, Thomas Pollock Anshutz
Thomas Pollock Anshutz
Thomas Pollock Anshutz was an American painter and teacher. Co-founder of The Darby School and leader at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Anshutz was known for his award winning portraiture work and working friendship with Thomas Eakins.-Personal life and education:Thomas Anshutz was born in...
, Edward Willis Redfield
Edward Willis Redfield
Edward Willis Redfield was an American Impressionist landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, often depicting the snow-covered countryside.Redfield was born in 1869 in Bridgeville, Delaware...
, Colin Campbell Cooper
Colin Campbell Cooper
Colin Campbell Cooper, Jr. was an American Impressionist painter, perhaps most renowned for his architectural paintings, especially of skyscrapers in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. An avid traveler, he was also known for his paintings of European and Asian landmarks, as well as natural...
, Alice Barber Stephens
Alice Barber Stephens
Alice Barber Stephens was an American painter and engraver, best remembered for her illustrations.She was born on a farm in Salem, New Jersey, and attended local schools. Her Quaker family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at age 15 she became a student at the Philadelphia School of Design...
, Frederick Judd Waugh
Frederick Judd Waugh
Frederick Judd Waugh was an American artist, primarily known as a marine artist. During World War I, he designed ship camouflage for the U.S. Navy, under the direction of Everett L. Warner.-Background:...
, T. S. Sullivant
T. S. Sullivant
Thomas Starling Sullivant was an influential American cartoonist who signed his work T. S. Sullivant. Best known today for his animal caricatures, he drew political cartoons and illustrated children's books....
and A. B. Frost
A. B. Frost
Arthur Burdett Frost , was an early American illustrator, graphic artist and comics writer. He was also well known as a painter. Frost's work is well known for its dynamic representation of motion and sequence. Frost is considered one of the great illustrators in the "Golden Age of American...
.
He stated his teaching philosophy bluntly, "A teacher can do very little for a pupil & should only be thankful if he don’t hinder him ... and the greater the master, mostly the less he can say."
He believed that women should "assume professional privileges" as would men. Life classes and dissection were segregated but women had access to male models (who were nude but for loincloths).
The line between impartiality and questionable behavior was a thin one. When a female student, Amelia Van Buren
Amelia Van Buren
Amelia C. Van Buren was an American photographer who was best known for being the subject of Thomas Eakins's c. 1891 painting Miss Amelia Van Buren.-Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts:...
, asked about the movement of the pelvis, Eakins invited her to his studio, where he undressed and "gave her the explanation as I could not have done by words only". Such incidents, coupled with the ambitions of his younger associates to oust him and take over the school themselves, created tensions between him and the Academy's board of directors. He was ultimately forced to resign in 1886, for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. Eakins took the dismissal hard. His family was split, with his in-laws siding against him in public dispute. He struggled to protect his name against rumors and false charges, had bouts of ill health, and suffered a humiliation which he felt for the rest of his life.
Eakins' popularity amongst the students was such that a number of them broke with the Academy and formed the Art Students' League of Philadelphia
Art Students' League of Philadelphia
Art Students' League of Philadelphia was a short-lived, co-operative art school formed in reaction to Thomas Eakins's February 1886 forced-resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts...
, where Eakins subsequently instructed. It was there that he met the student, Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray
Samuel Aloysius Murray was an American sculptor, and protégé of the painter Thomas Eakins.-Murray and Eakins:...
, who would become his protege and life-long friend. He also lectured and taught at a number of other schools, including the Art Students League of New York
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
, the National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
, Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
, and the Art Students' Guild in Washington, D.C., until he withdrew from teaching by 1898.
Photography
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible...
, particularly the equine studies, and became interested in using the camera to study sequential movement. He performed his own motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film. Where Muybridge's system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures on one negative. An excellent example is his painting A May Morning in the Park
The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand
The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand is an 1879-80 painting by Thomas Eakins. It shows Fairman Rogers driving a coaching party in his four-in-hand carriage through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park...
, which relied heavily on these motion studies to depict the true gait of the four horses pulling the coach of patron Fairman Rogers
Fairman Rogers
Fairman Rogers was an American civil engineer, educator, and philanthropist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....
. But in typical fashion Eakins also employed wax figures and oil sketches to get the final effect he desired.
After Eakins obtained a camera in 1880, several paintings, such as Mending the Net (1881) and Arcadia (painting) (1883), are known to have been derived at least in part from his photographs. Some figures appear to be detailed transcriptions and tracings from the photographs by some device like a magic lantern, which Eakins took pains to cover up with oil paint. Eakins' methods appear to be meticulously applied, and rather than shortcuts, were likely used in a quest for accuracy and realism. The so-called "Naked Series", which began in 1883, were nude photos of students and professional models which were taken to show real human anatomy from several specific angles, and were often hung up and displayed for study at the school. Later, less regimented poses were taken indoors and out, of men, women, and children, including his wife. The most provocative, and the only ones combining males and females, were nude photos of Eakins and a female model (see below). Although witnesses and chaperones were usually on site, and the poses were mostly traditional in nature, the sheer quantity of the photos and Eakins’ overt display of them may have undermined his standing at the Academy. In all, about eight hundred photographs are now attributed to Eakins and his circle, most of which are figure studies, both clothed and nude, and portraits. No other American artist of his time matched Eakins' interest in photography, nor produced a comparable body of photographic works.
Portraits
"I will never have to give up painting, for even now I could paint heads good enough to make a living anywhere in America."
For Eakins, portraiture held little interest as a means of fashionable idealization or even simple verisimilitude—it provided the opportunity to reveal the character of an individual through the modeling of solid anatomical form. This meant that, notwithstanding his youthful optimism, he would never be a commercially successful portrait painter. Few commissions came his way. But his total output of some two hundred and fifty portraits is characterized by "an uncompromising search for the unique human being".
Often this search for individuality required that the subject be painted in his working environment. His Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand
Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand
Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand is an 1874 painting by Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and depicts Benjamin H. Rand, a doctor at Jefferson Medical College who taught Eakins anatomy. In the painting, Rand is reading a book while petting a cat....
(1874) was a prelude to what many consider his most important work. In The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Gross, is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and measures by . Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students...
(1875), a renowned Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel D. Gross
Samuel D. Gross
Samuel David Gross was an American academic trauma surgeon. Surgeon biographer Isaac Minis Hays called Gross "The Nestor of American Surgery." He is immortalized in Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic, , perhaps the most important American painting of the nineteenth century.-Early life and...
, is seen presiding over an operation to remove part of a diseased bone from a patient's thigh. Gross lectures in an amphitheater crowded with students at Jefferson Medical College. Eakins spent nearly a year on the painting, again choosing a novel subject, the discipline of modern surgery, in which Philadelphia was in the forefront. He initiated the project and may have had the goal of a grand work befitting a showing at the Centennial Exposition
Centennial Exposition
The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World's Fair in the United States, was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It was officially...
of 1876. Though rejected for the Art Gallery, the painting was shown on the centennial grounds at an exhibit of a U.S. Army Post Hospital. In sharp contrast, The Chess Players was accepted by the Committee and was much admired at the Centennial Exhibition, and critically praised.
In 1876, Eakins completed a portrait of Dr. John Brinton, surgeon of the Philadelphia Hospital, and famed for his Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
service. Done in a more informal setting than The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Gross, is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and measures by . Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students...
, it was a personal favorite of Eakins, and The Art Journal
The Art Journal
The Art Journal, published in London, was the most important Victorian magazine on art. It was founded in 1839 by Hodgson & Graves, print publishers, 6 Pall Mall, with the title the Art Union Monthly Journal, the first issue of 750 copies appearing 15 February 1839.Hodgson & Graves hired Samuel...
proclaimed "it is in every respect a more favorable example of this artist's abilities than his much-talked-of composition representing a dissecting room." Other outstanding examples of his portraits include The Agnew Clinic
The Agnew Clinic
The Agnew Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Agnew, is an 1889 oil painting by American artist Thomas Eakins, Goodrich #235. It was commissioned to honor anatomist and surgeon David Hayes Agnew, on his retirement from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.-Background:The Agnew Clinic depicts Dr....
(1889), Eakins' most important commission and largest painting, which depicted another eminent American surgeon, Dr. David Hayes Agnew
David Hayes Agnew
David Hayes Agnew was an American surgeon.- Biography :He was born on November 24, 1818 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1838, and a few years later set up in practice at Philadelphia and became a lecturer at the...
, performing a mastectomy; The Dean's Roll Call (1899), featuring Dr. James W. Holland, and Professor Leslie W. Miller (1901), portraits of educators standing as if addressing an audience; a portrait of Frank Hamilton Cushing
Frank Hamilton Cushing
Frank Hamilton Cushing was an American anthropologist and ethnologist...
(ca. 1895), in which the prominent ethnologist is seen performing an incantation in a Zuñi pueblo; Professor Henry A. Rowland (1897), a brilliant scientist whose study of spectroscopy revolutionized his field; Antiquated Music (1900), in which Mrs. William D. Frishmuth is shown seated amidst her collection of musical instruments; and The Concert Singer
The Concert Singer
The Concert Singer is a painting by Thomas Eakins , depicting the singer Weda Cook . The work, commenced in 1890 and completed in 1892, was Eakins's first full-length portrait of a woman...
(1890–92), for which Eakins asked Weda Cook to sing "O rest in the Lord", so that he could study the muscles of her throat and mouth. In order to replicate the proper deployment of a baton, Eakins enlisted an orchestra conductor to pose for the hand seen in the lower left-hand corner of the painting.
Of Eakins' later portraits, many took as their subjects women who were friends or students. Unlike most portrayals of women at the time, they are devoid of glamor and idealization. For Portrait of Letitia Wilson Jordan (1888), Eakins painted the sitter wearing the same evening dress in which he had seen her at a party. She is a substantial presence, a vision quite different from the era's fashionable portraiture. So, too, his Portrait of Maud Cook
Portrait of Maud Cook
Portrait of Maud Cook is an 1895 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins. Given the artist's lack of interest in fashion or conventional beauty, the portrait has been noted as "a rare example of Eakins's studying the physical beauty of a young woman," and "one of Eakins's...
(1895), where the obvious beauty of the subject is noted with "a stark objectivity".
The portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren
Miss Amelia Van Buren
Miss Amelia Van Buren or Portrait of Amelia C. Van Buren is a ca. 1891 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins , now in the The Phillips Collection. It depicts Amelia Van Buren Miss Amelia Van Buren or Portrait of Amelia C. Van Buren is a ca. 1891 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins...
(ca. 1890), a friend and former pupil, suggests the melancholy of a complex personality, and has been called "the finest of all American portraits". Even Susan Macdowell Eakins
Susan Macdowell Eakins
Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins was an American artist and wife of Thomas Eakins. She was the fifth of eight children of a Philadelphia engraver, well known in the artistic community...
, a strong painter and former student who married Eakins in 1884, was not sentimentalized: despite its richness of color, The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog (ca. 1884-89) is a penetratingly candid portrait.
Deeply affected by his dismissal from the Academy, Eakins's later career focused on portraiture, such as his 1905 Portrait of Professor William S. Forbes. His steadfast insistence on his own vision of realism, in addition to his notoriety from his school scandals, combined to hurt his income in later years. Even as he approached these portraits with the skill of a highly trained anatomist, what is most noteworthy is the intense psychological presence of his sitters. However, it was precisely for this reason that his portraits were often rejected by the sitters or their families. As a result, Eakins came to rely on his friends and family members to model for portraits. His portrait of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
(1887–1888) was the poet's favorite.
The figure
Eakins' lifelong interest in the figure, nude or nearly so, took several thematic forms. The rowing paintings of the early 1870s constitute the first series of figure studies. In Eakins' largest picture on the subject, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873), the muscular dynamism of the body is given its fullest treatment.In the 1877 painting William Rush and His Model
William Rush and His Model
William Rush and His Model is the name given to several paintings by Thomas Eakins, one set from 1876-77 and the other from 1908. These works depict the American wood sculptor William Rush in 1808, carving his statue Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain at Philadelphia's first waterworks...
, he painted the female nude as integral to a historical subject, even though there is no evidence that the model who posed for Rush did so in the nude. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 helped foster a revival in interest in Colonial America and Eakins participated with an ambitious project employing oil studies, wax and wood models, and finally the portrait in 1877. William Rush
William Rush
William Rush was a U.S. neoclassical sculptor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is considered the first major American sculptor....
was a celebrated Colonial sculptor and ship carver, a revered example of an artist-citizen who figured prominently in Philadelphia civic life, and a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where Eakins had started teaching. Despite his sincerely depicted reverence for Rush, Eakins' treatment of the human body once again drew criticism. This time it was the nude model and her heaped-up clothes depicted front and center, with Rush relegated to the deep shadows in the left background, that stirred dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, Eakins found a subject which referenced his native city, an earlier Philadelphia artist, and allowed for an assay on the female nude seen from behind. When he returned to the subject many years later, the narrative became more personal: In William Rush and His Model (1908), gone are the chaperon and detailed interior of the earlier work. The professional distance between sculptor and model has been eliminated, and the relationship has become intimate. In one version of the painting from that year, the nude is seen from the front, being helped down from the model stand by an artist who bears a strong resemblance to Eakins.
The Swimming Hole
The Swimming Hole is an 1884–85 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins , Goodrich catalog #190, in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts six men swimming naked in a lake, and is considered a masterpiece of American painting...
(1884-5) features Eakins' finest studies of the nude, in his most successfully constructed outdoor picture. The figures are those of his friends and students, and include a self-portrait. Although there are photographs by Eakins which relate to the painting, the picture's powerful pyramidal composition and sculptural conception of the individual bodies are completely distinctive pictorial resolutions. The work was painted on commission, but was refused.
In the late 1890s Eakins returned to the male figure, this time in a more urban setting. Taking the Count (1896), a painting of a prizefight, was his second largest canvas, but not his most successful composition. The same may be said of Wrestlers
Wrestlers (painting)
Wrestlers is an 1899 painting by Thomas Eakins, Goodrich catalog #317. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts two nearly naked men engaged in a wrestling match. One figure has the other in a half nelson and crotch hold. Eakins painted the work from a nearly identical photograph.The photograph was...
(1899). More successful was Between Rounds (1899), for which boxer Billy Smith posed seated in his corner at Philadelphia's Arena; in fact, all the principal figures were posed by models re-enacting what had been an actual fight. Salutat
Salutat
Salutat is an 1898 painting by Thomas Eakins . Based on a real-life boxing match that occurred in 1898, the work depicts a boxer waving to the crowd after the match...
(1898), a frieze-like composition in which the main figure is isolated, "is one of Eakins' finest achievements in figure-painting."
In his later years Eakins persistently asked his female portrait models to pose in the nude, a practice which would have been all but prohibited in conventional Philadelphia society. Inevitably, his desires were frustrated.
Marriage
Eakins married Susan Hannah MacdowellSusan Macdowell Eakins
Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins was an American artist and wife of Thomas Eakins. She was the fifth of eight children of a Philadelphia engraver, well known in the artistic community...
, one of his students at the Academy, in 1884. She was the fifth of eight children of a Philadelphia engraver, well known in the artistic community.
She was 25 when Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery where "The Gross Clinic" was being exhibited in 1875. Unlike many, she was impressed by the controversial painting and she decided to study with him at the Academy, which she attended for 6 years, adopting a sober, realistic style similar to her teacher's. She was an outstanding student and winner of the Mary Smith prize for the best painting by a matriculating woman artist.
After their childless marriage, she only painted sporadically and spent most of her time supporting her husband's career, entertaining guests and students, and faithfully backing him in his difficult times with the Academy, even when some members of her family aligned against Eakins.
She and Eakins both shared a passion for photography, both as photographers and subjects, and employed it as a tool for their art. She also posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him. Both had separate studios in their home.
After his death in 1916, she returned to painting, adding considerably to her output right up to the 1930s, in a style that became warmer, looser, and brighter in tone. She died in 1938. Thirty-five years after her death, in 1973, she had her first one-woman exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Legacy
Late in life Eakins did experience some recognition. In 1902 he was made a National AcademicianNational Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
. In 1914 the sale of a portrait study of D. Hayes Agnew for The Agnew Clinic to Dr. Albert C. Barnes
Albert C. Barnes
Albert Coombs Barnes was an American chemist and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic, anti-blindness drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution based on his private collection of art...
precipitated much publicity when rumors circulated that the selling price was fifty thousand dollars. In fact, Barnes bought the painting for four thousand dollars.
In the year after his death Eakins was honored with a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, and in 1917-18 the Pennsylvania Academy followed suit. Susan Macdowell Eakins did much to preserve his reputation, including gifting the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
with more than fifty of her husband's oil paintings. After her death in 1938, other works were sold off, and eventually another large collection of art and personal material was purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn
Joseph Hirshhorn
]Joseph Herman Hirshhorn was an entrepreneur, financier and art collector. Born in Mitau, Latvia, the twelfth of thirteen children, Hirshhorn emigrated to the United States with his widowed mother at the age of six....
, and now is part of the Hirshhorn Museum's collection. Since then, Eakins' home in North Philadelphia
North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
North Philadelphia, nicknamed North Philly, is a section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is immediately north of Center City...
was put on the National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
list in 1966, and Eakins Oval
Eakins Oval
At the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is Eakins Oval. The loop of road is usually host to a large volume of traffic as it connects the core of the city with Fairmount Park, Kelly Drive , and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive...
, across from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Benjamin Franklin Parkway is a scenic boulevard that runs through the cultural heart of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Named for favorite son Benjamin Franklin, the mile-long Parkway cuts diagonally across the grid plan pattern of Center City's Northwest quadrant...
, was named for the artist. In 1967 The Biglin Brothers Racing (1872) was reproduced on a United States postage stamp
Postage stamp
A postage stamp is a small piece of paper that is purchased and displayed on an item of mail as evidence of payment of postage. Typically, stamps are made from special paper, with a national designation and denomination on the face, and a gum adhesive on the reverse side...
.
Eakins's attitude toward realism in painting, and his desire to explore the heart of American life proved influential. He taught hundreds of students, among them his future wife Susan Macdowell, African-American painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.-Education:...
, and Thomas Anshutz
Thomas Pollock Anshutz
Thomas Pollock Anshutz was an American painter and teacher. Co-founder of The Darby School and leader at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Anshutz was known for his award winning portraiture work and working friendship with Thomas Eakins.-Personal life and education:Thomas Anshutz was born in...
, who taught, in turn, Robert Henri
Robert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
, George Luks
George Luks
George Benjamin Luks, was an American realist artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan school in American art.-Early life:...
, John Sloan
John French Sloan
John French Sloan was an American artist. As a member of The Eight, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window...
, and Everett Shinn
Everett Shinn
Everett Shinn was an American realist painter and member of the Ashcan School, also known as 'the Eight.' He was the youngest member of the group of modernist painters who explored the depiction of real life...
, future members of the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
, and other realists
American realism
300px|thumb|[[Ashcan School]] artists & friends at [[John French Sloan]]'s Philadelphia Studio, 1898American realism was an early 20th century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the time period...
and artistic heirs to Eakins' philosophy. Though his is not a household name, and though during his lifetime Eakins struggled to make a living from his work, today he is regarded as one of the most important American artists of any period.
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
of his male nudes and for the complexity of his attitudes toward women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was accused of abusing female students. Recent scholarship suggests that these scandals were grounded in more than the "puritanical prudery" of his contemporaries— as had once been assumed— and that Eakins's progressive academic principles may have protected unconscious and dubious agendas. These controversies may have been caused by a combination of factors such as the bohemianism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), the intensity and authority of his teaching style, and Eakins's inclination toward unorthodox or provocative behavior.
Thomas Jefferson University
Thomas Jefferson University is a private health sciences university in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The university consists of six constituent colleges and schools, Jefferson Medical College, Jefferson College of Graduate Studies, Jefferson School of Health...
agreed to sell The Gross Clinic to the National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington, D.C., and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas
Bentonville, Arkansas
Bentonville, Arkansas is a city in Northwest Bahamas, and county seat of Benton County, Arkansas, United States The population was 35,301 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers, AR-MO Metropolitan Statistical Area...
for a record $68,000,000, the highest price for an Eakins painting as well as a record price for an individual American-made portrait. On December 21, 2006, a group of donors agreed to pay $68,000,000 in order to keep the painting in Philadelphia. It is displayed alternately at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Assessment
On October 29, 1917, Robert HenriRobert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
wrote an open letter to the Art Students League
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
about Eakins:
Thomas Eakins was a man of great character. He was a man of iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go. This he did. It cost him heavily but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind. Eakins was a deep student of life, and with a great love he studied humanity frankly. He was not afraid of what his study revealed to him.
In the matter of ways and means of expression, the science of technique, he studied most profoundly, as only a great master would have the will to study. His vision was not touched by fashion. He struggled to apprehend the constructive force in nature and to employ in his works the principles found. His quality was honesty. "Integrity" is the word which seems best to fit him. Personally I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced.
In 1982, in his two-volume Eakins biography, art historian Lloyd Goodrich
Lloyd Goodrich
Lloyd Goodrich was an influential American art historian. He wrote extensively on American artists, including Edward Hopper, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Raphael Soyer and Reginald Marsh...
wrote:
In spite of limitations--and what artist is free of them?--Eakins' achievement was monumental. He was our first major painter to accept completely the realities of contemporary urban America, and from them to create powerful, profound art...In portraiture alone Eakins was the strongest American painter since CopleyJohn Singleton CopleyJohn Singleton Copley was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts, and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects...
, with equal substance and power, and added penetration, depth, and subtlety.
John Canaday
John Canaday
John Edwin Canaday was a leading American art critic, author and art historian.-Early life:...
, art critic for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, wrote in 1964:
As a supreme realist, Eakins appeared heavy and vulgar to a public that thought of art, and culture in general, largely in terms of a graceful sentimentality. Today he seems to us to have recorded his fellow Americans with a perception that was often as tender as it was vigorous, and to have preserved for us the essence of an American life which, indeed, he did not idealize--because it seemed to him beautiful beyond the necessity of idealization.
Further reading
- Adams, Henry: Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0195156684.
- Berger, Martin: Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Guilded Age Manhood. University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0520222091.
- Canaday, John: Thomas Eakins; "Familiar truths in clear and beautiful language", Horizon. Volume VI, Number 4, Autumn 1964.
- Doyle, Jennifer: "Sex, Scandal, and 'The Gross Clinic'". Representations 68 (Fall 1999): 1-33.
- Goodrich, Lloyd: Thomas Eakins. Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN 0-674-88490-6
- Homer, William InnesWilliam Innes HomerWilliam Innes Homer is an American academic, art historian, and author. Homer is an expert in the life and works of painter Thomas Eakins.-Academic career:...
: Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art. Abbeville Press, 1992. ISBN 1-55859-281-4 - Johns, Elizabeth: Thomas Eakins. Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN 0691002886
- Kirkpatrick, Sidney: The Revenge of Thomas Eakins. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0300108559.
- Lubin, David: Acts of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargeant, James. Yale University Press, 1985. ISBN 0300032137
- Sewell, Darrel; et al. Thomas Eakins. Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87633-143-6
- Sewell, Darrel: Thomas Eakins: Artist of Philadelphia. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982. ISBN 0-87633-047-2
- Updike, John: Still Looking: Essays on American Art. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4418-9
- Weinberg, H. Barbara: Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. Publication no: 885-660
- Werbel, Amy: Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780300116557.
- The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins. Edited by William Innes Homer. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-691-13808-4
- Braddock, Alan: Thomas Eakins and The Cultures of Modernity. University of California Press, 2009. ISBN 9780520255203
External links
- wThomaseakins.org, 148 works by Thomas Eakins
- Thomas Eakins Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Thomas Eakins letters online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Selections from the Seymour Adelman collection, 1845-1958 features a collection of documents relating to Eakins and his family from the Archives of American ArtArchives of American ArtThe Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...