Thomas Eakins

American painter

• Born: July 25, 1844
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: June 25, 1916
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Eakins produced a small body of major paintings that were to add to the reputation of the United States as a center of art independent of Europe. He was also an important influence on art education in the United States.

Early Life

Thomas Eakins (EE-kihns) was the son of Benjamin Eakins, a writing master of Scottish-Irish parentage in the Philadelphia school system. Eakins had early ambitions to follow his father into that work. His mother was of English and Dutch descent. It was a close, middle-class family with a modest private income that was to help support Eakins throughout his life, because his teaching and painting did not always do so. He was particularly close to his three sisters, and they often appear in his paintings.

Eakins evidenced early talents in draftsmanship and drawing and was to study them formally from high school onward, but he also had strengths in science, mathematics, and languages. Eakins was to use his knowledge of science and mathematics extensively in the preparation of his more complicated paintings.

Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, from 1861 to 1866. Drawing from casts of fine antique sculpture was the center of the technical studies at the school, and to Eakins’s dissatisfaction, little drawing was done from live models. He supplemented his work by enrolling in anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College, where he was allowed to watch surgeons operating, and where he began a practice that he admitted he disliked, but that he considered essential to the student artist—the study of anatomy—by taking part in dissection classes. By the end of his time at the academy, he had done very little painting. In September, 1866, he left for France in order to study in Paris.

Eakins entered the conservative École des Beaux-Arts, choosing to study under the painter Jean-Leon Gerome, who was himself somewhat conservative and old-fashioned, but who gave Eakins a thorough grounding in drawing, with emphasis on the use of live models. Eakins again added anatomy classes to his studies, and when he started to paint seriously in his second year, he took a studio where he could work alone while continuing his instruction under Gerome.

Eakins’s correspondence evidences little interest in what was going on about him in Paris, although it was a time of considerable ferment in the art world, and the early work of the painters who were to become the Impressionists was being shown and discussed. At the end of his three years in Paris, he toured the galleries of Spain, showing particular enthusiasm for the technique and realistic subject matter of José Ribera and Diego Velázquez. On July 4, 1870, he returned to Philadelphia, where he was to live and work for the remainder of his life.

Life’s Work

There had been indications of a fully formed skill in a few of Eakins’s paintings during the late 1860’s, and that maturity was soon confirmed in his work during the 1870’s. A solid and stocky young man (he can be seen hovering in the middle-background of some of his paintings) with an active interest in rowing and hunting, he brought the world of his athletic pleasures into his paintings, and he is best known for a group of stunningly forceful studies of rowers that exemplify the American love of high athletic skill and outdoor life. John Biglin in a Single Scull (1873) and Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871) are the most popular examples of these intense, imploded moments of athletic focus, in which the subjects, patently modest, convey an aesthetic rightness, a kind of metaphysical truth about life that connects them with the earlier tradition of American paintings celebrating the rugged men working the rivers of America.

This paean to personal skill is explored again in Eakins’s pictures of surgeons at work, musicians at play, and prize-fighters in action. Eakins was, however, to run into trouble with the public, who found his paintings of surgeons at work in the operating theaters too gruesome and bloody, and his paintings of male and female nudes were often considered too crudely unblinkered. He could, on the other hand, be quietly tender in his paintings of musicians, particularly in his studies of his sisters.

As a result, Eakins established a reputation as one of the foremost realists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, but he did not sell many pictures. In his later years, he turned more and more to portraits, generally using friends and acquaintances as subjects, and he rarely was commissioned to do so. He showed little inclination to idealize his portraits. Rather, he tended to catch his sitters in the introspective moment, and he was often successful in getting something of their character on the canvas. His later portraits often went further and revealed physical and emotional vulnerabilities that did not always please his subjects.

It is possible to think of Eakins as a portraitist from beginning to end, with the athletes and men of action showing the best of prime human endeavor, and some of the latter sitters revealing the cruel, inexorable nature of time passing. However, it is those early pictures of sportsmen that are, quite rightly, best remembered.

This mixed reputation that Eakins developed as a painter, of being enormously talented but a bit crude, carried over into his parallel career as an art teacher and administrator. In 1876, he joined the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as its instructor in the life classes; gradually he became so important to the school’s work that in 1882 he became the director. As he did in his own painting, he put heavy emphasis upon drawing from life, not because he did not appreciate the greatness of ancient sculpture but because he saw the naked human form as the best subject for the young artist. He also urged his students to take anatomy classes with medical students.

Over the years, opposition built up, inside the school and outside, over Eakins’s insistence that students, male and female, should draw from life. In 1886, his exposure of a male model, completely nude, before a class of female students caused such an avalanche of protest that he was asked to resign. He took a large group of male students with him, and they formed the Art Students League of Philadelphia with Eakins as the sole, unpaid instructor. The school lasted for six years but foundered eventually for financial reasons. Eakins continued to teach in art schools as a guest lecturer, but his insistence on using nude models often got him into trouble, and by mid-life, he ceased to teach.

Eakins had a continuing interest in sculpture and left a few pieces that show considerable skill, but the later years were in the main confined to doing portraits, with occasional returns to his studies of athletes and nudes.

Significance

Eakins made a double contribution to American culture. As an educator, he championed, to his own detriment, the need to repudiate the sometimes prurient sexual morality of the late nineteenth century in favor of an intelligent acceptance of the human body as the basis for study in art colleges. His fight, often played out in public, made it easier for such artistic and educational freedoms to become a common aspect of American art instruction.

Eakins was also the first prominent art teacher to bring science into the classroom and studio. His personal use of, and instruction in the preparation of, mathematically precise preliminary studies, his use of scale models, and particularly his pioneering use of photography were to become commonly applied tools.

Despite his training in France and his admiration for Spanish painters, Eakins was peculiarly American. His choice of subjects and his refusal to idealize them are examples of his solid, down-to-earth approach to art. Other painters romanticized the portrait; Eakins used it to record reality, however uncomplimentary. He has been called antiartistic, but he proved that art could be made out of life as it was seen. His refusal to compromise for profit and popularity is an example of his American forthrightness, and his affection for science, for mathematics, for photography, for sport, and for high professional endeavor may also be seen as marks of his American character.

Possessed of abundant painterly skills, Eakins often seems too skeptically stolid to make use of them, but at his best, particularly in his sporting pictures, he can make the simple moment accumulate a splendor that links him with painters such as Paul Cézanne and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. At those moments of pastoral innocence, the paintings achieve a poetic density that transcends and glorifies the simplicity of the mundane act of living. Then, he is at his best—and his most American.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Adams offers a radically different view of Eakins than has been presented in past biographes. His Eakins was an exhibitionist who preyed on young women, was confused about his sexual identity, and was a possible victim of childhood abuse.

Berger, Martin A. Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. In this account of Eakins’s life and art, Berger describes how he used his paintings to portray white, middle-class manhood, reflecting American society’s changing ideas about masculinity in the final years of the nineteenth century.

Foster, Kathleen A. Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Catalog of the artworks contained in the collection and an essay by Foster reassessing Eakins’s work. Foster analyzes the techniques Eakins used when working in various media and describes the development of his imagery.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Thomas Eakins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. An updated look at Eakins, including interviews with Eakins’s widow, students, and sitters. Good bibliography of articles about the artist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933. A major study combining critical biography and catalog in which the reviving reputation of the artist is assessed in conjunction with the neglect that followed his death.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Thomas Eakins: Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970. A paperback monograph, prepared for the major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum of American Art by the scholar most involved with putting Eakins into the mainstream of American art. Good, with numerous reproductions and an excellent short essay.

Hendricks, Gordon. The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974. An obsessively detailed study, provocative in its assumptions.

Homer, William Innes. Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art. 2d ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 2002. Presents an unflattering portrait of Eakins, depicting him as a self-righteous, domineering egotist, with unconscious hostility toward women. Homer describes how this failed individual produced complex and humane art.

Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. An interesting study of specific subjects painted by Eakins, putting them into the context of how other artists have used the same subjects.

Siegl, Theodor. The Thomas Eakins Collection. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978. A careful assessment of Eakins’s individuality as a painter and a sympathetic consideration of his personality.