Mature period of Thomas Eakins

From his earliest student days, Eakins had been primarily interested in studying and portraying the human figure. His early sculling scenes displayed the musculature of athletic men, and The Gross Clinic dealt directly with the subject of human anatomy. But Eakins found few subjects in contemporary Philadelphia that afforded opportunities for portraying the undraped human figure, especially females. He circumvented this by painting repeatedly a partly imaginary scene of William Rush, a much earlier Philadelphia sculptor, carving his statue of the Water Nymph and Bittern from a naked female model in the presence of a chaperon, which provided him with a pictorial pretext for portraying a nude woman.

In the late 1870s Eakins began to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he became professor of drawing and painting in 1879. A popular and influential teacher, Eakins stressed anatomy and drawing from live, nude models as opposed to the study of plaster casts of antique sculpture. The fame of the Pennsylvania Academy as a centre for the best art instruction in the country spread among young artists. Yet notoriety accompanied repute, and objections were voiced increasingly from outside the academy to Eakins’s unrestrained use of nude models in front of mixed classes. The suspicious were unable to accept Eakins’s assurance that the relationship between artist and model was as innocent, objective, and professional as that between doctor and patient. Eakins continued to insist on the importance of teaching from nude human models and was finally forced to resign in 1886. Teaching had become a major part of his life, and this was another severe blow. He continued to teach sporadically at the newly formed Art Students League in Philadelphia and at the National Academy of Design in New York, and his personal relationships with young artists remained close. One bright moment during these difficult years occurred in 1884, when he married one of his pupils, Susan Macdowell.

As a corollary to his interest in anatomy, Eakins was fascinated with locomotion—human and animal figures in motion. A commission in 1879 to paint Fairman Rogers driving his four-in-hand coach through Fairmount Park in Philadelphia led him to an intensive study of horse anatomy, and he made a number of sculpted wax sketches of horses in motion. He developed a serious interest in sculpture, an aspect of his art that only became appreciated much later. His interest in locomotion led to familiarity with the experiments in sequential photography being made in California by Eadweard Muybridge. By 1884 Eakins himself was experimenting with multiple-image photography of moving athletes and animals. And in later years his interest in the human figure in motion led him to make a series of impressive paintings of boxing scenes.

Eakins’s interests ranged widely—sports, anatomy, locomotion, music, sculpture, photography—in directions often reminiscent of his great French contemporary Edgar Degas but without that artist’s innovative stylistic concerns. There is no evidence, however, that Eakins was aware of the work of Degas. Eakins’s art does demand comparison with that of Winslow Homer, the contemporary he most admired and his principal rival claimant to the title of the greatest American artist of the 19th century. Homer, also an objective realist, was similarly interested in outdoor sports and such sporting subjects as hunting, canoeing, and fishing. He also had a similar love for and identification with a specific place—in Homer’s case, Prouts Neck, Maine. Homer’s art is cool, detached, impersonal, and ultimately pessimistic in its view that humans are at the mercy of a deterministic universe. Eakins’s art, although often sad in its reflection of the buffeting each human receives in the course of his years, still is ultimately optimistic in its humanism, in its message that humans, through their individual actions—a doctor with a knife, a sculler with an oar, a hunter with a gun, a boxer with his gloved fist, a musician with his instrument, a singer with her voice, a chess player with his pieces, a scientist with his instruments—can act, do things, have an effect in this world. Despite the wide variety of his subject matter, almost all of Eakins’s art is portraiture, images of real people whom he knew and loved or respected. In his representations of the physical world, Eakins combined a technical ability to depict the external aspect of things with a probing for the essence of each scene. In his portraits of individuals, he similarly combined the faithful representation of the external and anatomical realities of each person with a deeper probing into the subject’s inner being and character. The people he portrays have lived, and often their experiences are etched on their faces. The wear and tear of years is not glossed over but celebrated in staring eyes, wrinkles, and slumping torsos.

Significance and influence

Although always respected for his ability, Eakins remained throughout his years something of an outcast. His contemporaries, rather than allowing themselves to be shaken by his frank statements of the human condition and his joyous appreciation of the human body, ignored him. He sold few pictures, but fortunately a small private income matched his modest needs. Unfettered by the demands of clients, Eakins was free to paint what and, more importantly, whom he wished. His art was never compromised by the need to flatter patrons or sitters, and honesty was his only policy. Good friends and faithful followers rather than fame and fortune were his lot. Not until 1916, the year of his death, was one of his paintings acquired by a museum—Pushing for Rail (1874), acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“the Met”), New York City—and the first major exhibition of his work was held the following year at the Met. But Eakins’s art had its long-range effect, serving as a model and an impetus for the burst of realism in American painting during the early years of the 20th century, especially in the work of George Bellows and the group called the Ashcan School of painters. And despite the increasing dominance of abstract art during the middle years of the 20th century, a pervasive and stubborn substream of realism surfaced periodically—Regionalism, Pop art, the figurative work of artists such as George Segal and Leonard Baskin—to manifest the continuing debt of American art to the achievement of Thomas Eakins.

Among Eakins’s published writings are A Drawing Manual (2005), edited by Kathleen A. Foster, and The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins (2009), edited by William Innes Homer.