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 American artists.TFAOI.com, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Retrieved July 27, 2009
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 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 contemporary Philadelphia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings set in the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject that 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. Eakins took keen interest in new motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator.
Eakins was also an educator, and his instruction was a highly influential presence in American art. The difficulties he encountered as an artist were seeking to paint portraits and figures realistically as behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and challenged his reputation.
Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little 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".Goodrich, Volume II, p. 285.
Early life and education
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 Scottish and Irish ancestry.Goodrich, Vol. I, pp. 1–4. His father 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. 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, all skills he later applied to his art.Amy B. Werbel, Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, , p. 5
Eakins was an athletic child who enjoyed rowing, ice skating, swimming, wrestling, sailing, and gymnastics; he later used these as subjects in his painting and encouraged them in his students. Eakins attended Central High School in Philadelphia, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing. Eakins met fellow artist and lifelong friend Charles Lewis Fussell in high school, and they reunited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where Eakins enrolled in 1861. At Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins enrolled in courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864 to 1865. For a while, he followed his father's profession and was listed in city directories as a writing teacher.Amy B. Werbel, p. 10 His scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon.Canaday, John: "Thomas Eakins; Familiar truths in clear and beautiful language", Horizon, p. 96. Vol. VI, no. 4, Autumn, 1964.
Eakins then studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, including with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris; he was only the second American pupil of the French realist painter, who was known as a master of Orientalism.H. Barbara Weinberg, Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, , p. 15 Eakins also attended the atelier of Léon Bonnat, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Eakins. While studying at the , 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.Homer, William Innes, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art, p. 36. Abbeville Press, 1992.
Already at age 24, "nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness in his mind."Updike, John: "The Ache in Eakins", Still Looking, p. 80. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 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.In a big picture you can see what o'clock it is afternoon or morning if it's hot or cold winter or summer and what kind of people are there and what they are doing and why they are doing it. Homer, p. 36.
A trip to Spain for six months confirmed his admiration for the realism of artists such as Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera.Spanish work [is] so good so strong so reasonable so free from every affectation. It stands out like nature itself... Updike, p. 72. In Seville in 1869, he painted Carmelita Requeña (image link), a portrait of a seven-year-old Romani 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 (image link), wherein he first dealt with the complications of a scene observed outside the studio.Homer, p. 44. Although he failed to matriculate in a formal degree program and had shown no works in the European 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",H. Barbara Weinberg, p. 23 he declared.
Career
Eakins' 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".Marc Simpson, Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, , p. 28 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, and preparatory drawings of the figure and perspective plans of the scull in the water.Perspective drawings for another rowing painting, The Pair-Oared Shell, were so precise that one researcher claimed not only to be able to reconstruct distances within the picture, but to establish the position of the sun so as to ascertain the scene's dating as 7:20 P.M. on either May 28 or July 27. Cited in Sewell, p. 17. 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.Goodrich, Vol. I, pp. 82–83. 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.Marc Simpson, p. 29
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; image link), Elizabeth at the Piano (1875; image link), The Chess Players (1876), and Elizabeth Crowell and her Dog (1874; image link), each dark in tonality, focus on the unsentimental characterization of individuals adopting natural attitudes in their homes."These works have their own kind of sober poetry." Goodrich, Vol. I, p. 71.
It was in this vein that in 1872 he painted his first large scale portrait, Kathrin (image link), 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.Goodrich, Vol. I, p. 81.
Teaching and forced resignation
Eakins returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876 as a volunteer after the opening of the school's new Frank Furness designed building. He 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 understanding anatomy and the study of motion, and disallowed prize competitions.Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, , p. 102 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.Goodrich, Vol. I, p. 282. 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' Arch in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.Sewell, p. 78.
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".Weinberg, H. Barbara, Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 28. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. 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, A. B. Frost,, and Canadian painter George Agnew Reid.
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."Kathleen A. Foster, p. 102 He believed that women should "assume professional privileges" as would men.Eakins, letter to Edward Hornor Coates, September 11, 1886, cited in Homer, p. 166. Life classes and dissection were segregated but women had access to male models (who were nude but wore loincloths).Sewell et al. 2001, pp. 103–04