Thomas Eakins

“I was born in Philadelphia July 15, 1844. I had many instructors, the principal ones Gérôme, Dumont (sculptor), Bonnat. I taught in the [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts] from the opening of the schools until I was turned out, a period much longer than I should have permitted myself to remain there. My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, & neglect, enhanced because unsought.” [1]

Personally controversial during his lifetime and today, Thomas Eakins’s place in American art history as one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century, along with his contemporary Winslow Homer, remains secure, through such aesthetic achievements in such works as The Champion Single Sculls (1871), The Gross Clinic (1875), The Concert Singer (1890-92), The Agnew Clinic (1889), and The Thinker (Portrait of Louis N. Kenton) (1900). Like Homer, Eakins was not part of a school and had no direct followers, but his controversial career and singularly focused aesthetic production are seen as key to the development of American art away from popular acceptance and academic training towards an emphasis on the genius of the individual, quintessentially American artist. Eakins’s lifelong commitment to straightforward realism, anatomy, linear perspective, mathematics, and science set him apart as a profound and highly original artist, one of the greatest of all American painters.

Positive critical reaction to Eakins’s work began to surface during the last decade of his lifetime and gained momentum over the course of the twentieth century. Critical reception reached full force in the 1970s, a time of renewed interest in American art and in Eakins in particular by collectors and historians of art. In 1923, the art historian Royal Cortissoz was dismissive of the artist: “Eakins began with a realistic point of view which completely excluded the operation of the imagination, a point of view insensitive to taste, to beauty, and his consistency, whatever its fortifying powers may have been, blinded him to all that was happening in the art of his time.” [2] But, by 1942, Roland McKinney was confident in claiming Eakins as a major influence on subsequent American painting: “Eakins was a realist and may be regarded as the father of that large school of painting loosely classified as “The American Scene.” The theme of America, so vigorously pursued by “The Eight” [Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William J. Glackens, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast, and later George Bellows] and, in late years, by “The Trinity,” [Thomas Benton, Grant Wood, and James (sic) Steuart Curry] of mid-Western painters, found its mainspring in Eakins.”[3] In recent years, scholars including Henry Adams, David Lubin, Whitney Davis, and others have undertaken a reassessment of Eakins’s artistic production and influence in a psycho-sociological context.

Except for three years in Paris and half-year study in Spain, and a three month trip to the Dakota Territory, Thomas Eakins lived and worked his entire life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Benjamin Eakins, was a distinguished calligrapher and teacher of penmanship who was able to earn enough money through his profession and investments to support his children as adults, including his first-born and only son, Thomas. In the settings of his paintings, drawings, and photographs, one glimpses the physical world the artist inhabited in the interiors of his family’s house at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, at Jefferson Medical College, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and various meeting places of the Art Students’ League and boxing venues around the city. His landscapes show the venues for sport, hunting, and relaxation, which Eakins thoroughly enjoyed as participant and recorder in his paintings and photographs: rowing on the Schuykill River, shooting rails in the marshes on the family farm in Avondale, sailing on the Delaware River, ice skating, horse riding, swimming, wrestling, and boxing.

Eakins graduated from Philadelphia’s renowned Central High School in 1861, graduating with a demonstrated mastery of mechanical drawings, perspective and mathematics. Eakins did not enlist in the Union Army but instead enrolled in drawing courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1862. He supplemented his artistic study by enrolling in anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College. After four years of drawing at PAFA and with the support of his father, he decided that he would travel to Paris to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was accepted into the atelier of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, of whom Eakins would speak glowingly all his life although he did not paint like his teacher. According to art historian H. Barbara Weinberg, “Eakins pioneered his generation’s pursuit of French academic study, but he revealed himself to be much more devoted to academic process . . . than to academic product. He avoided the picturesque, exotic or ideal subjects that brought fame and fortune to contemporary academics, French or American. Instead he enlisted laborious anatomical and perspective studies to portray familiar figures in traditional portrait formats or in genre settings, and to paint genre scenes with strong portrait elements.” [4]

Eakins returned to Philadelphia from Europe in 1869 and began work as an artist. He began a series of rowing pictures on the Schuykill River featuring a former Central High School classmate, of which Max Schmitt in a Single Scull is the most famous. In 1874 he was invited to teach a life-drawing class at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. He had resumed his study of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and had begun work on what is generally considered his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, which depicted Dr. Samuel D. Gross during a surgical procedure in the medical amphitheatre of Jefferson Medical College. Eakins intended this painting for exhibition at the famous Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia in 1876. He was extremely disappointed that this work was shown not with the American art but rather in a hospital exhibit at the exhibition, and that the subject matter was considered distasteful and offensive by critics and viewers.

That same year, Eakins began volunteering as an instructor at the newly reopened Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; by 1879, he was appointed Professor of Drawing and Painting. One of his first acts was to establish a new curriculum for PAFA. All students, male and female, were to study life drawing and anatomy, including dissections and if necessary be a life model for other students. Eakins would (and did) pose himself. This practice would later prove extremely damaging to his career.

The artist had become interested in photography in 1879, inspired by the motion study pictures of Eadward Muybridge. He met and assisted Muybridge when the photographer worked at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884-85. Eakins became an avid photographer and adapted his technique as a preparatory aid for his paintings and sculpture. He also had his students pose and take photographs of the nude from all angles and in motion for a series of photographs intended to be instructional aids in drawing the human figure.

In 1882, Eakins was appointed director of PAFA, but, just four years later, he was asked to resign after a highly publicized classroom incident when Eakins removed a loincloth from a male model in front of a class that included both men and women. Students loyal to Eakins organized the Art Students League of Philadelphia, where Eakins continued to teach until it disbanded around 1893. Eakins’s insistence upon teaching anatomy using fully nude models in his mixed and female classes led to his dismissal from the National Academy of Design in New York in 1894 and Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute in 1895, after which he stopped teaching altogether. The controversy over his teaching methods, along with deaths and divisions within his own family, would swirl around Eakins for the remainder of his life. Eakins’s former art student, Susan Hannah MacDowell, whom he married in 1884, remained loyal to her husband throughout these controversies, and, after his death in 1916, fought to restore his reputation and place his work in important museum collections. Despite the lack of understanding for Eakins in his lifetime, the artistic, athletic, and scientific men and women who posed for Eakins must have sensed something of his artistic importance. “From his earliest years, he painted almost nothing but portraits. No more than twenty-five of these portraits (the whole body of which involved over two hundred sitters and subjects) were commissioned. For all of the others, it was Eakins who took the initiative and secured the participation of his sitters. And although his portraits offended so many of his sitters that the rejected paintings now comprise large museum holdings, particularly in Philadelphia, year after year prominent people made the climb to Eakins’s fourth-floor studio, and sat through his arduous requirements for sittings.” [5]

Towards the end of his life, Eakins began to accrue the honors and awards that one might have thought he would have received earlier in his career. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in New York as an Associate in 1902, becoming a full Academician shortly afterwards. In 1905 Eakins was given the Thomas R. Proctor Prize from NAD. In 1904 and 1907, he received gold medals from the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia’s American Art Society, respectively. A 1917 memorial exhibition mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by curator Bryson Burroughs began a critical re-assessment and appreciation for the realist painter.

Notes:

[1] Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, p. 148.

[2] Cortissoz, Royal. “Thomas Eakins,” American Artists, pp. 78-79.

[3] McKinney, Roland. Thomas Eakins, p. 10.

[4] Weinberg, H. Barbara, Thomas Eakins and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 5.

[5] Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, p. xix.