July 25, 2010 <Back to Index>
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Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts 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 forty years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, 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".
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. 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 L'Ecole 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. 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 Velazquez and Jusepe de Ribera. In Seville in 1870 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. 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 Scull (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. 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. His poor
judgment and provocative, disdainful behavior didn’t help matters
either. 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. 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 (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. Although
witnesses and chaparones 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 their 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, it 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.
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 ‘dignified’, 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; 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 C. 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. 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. 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 1877 he painted the female nude as integral to a historical subject, William Rush and His Model,
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. 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 principles were posed for by
models re-enacting their roles in 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. Eakins married Susan Hannah MacDowell,
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. |