Eakins, Thomas

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916), painter and portraitist.Thomas Eakins rarely enjoyed critical or popular success during his lifetime, but a 1930 Museum of Modern Art exhibition featuring his work together with that of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder helped establish his reputation as a major American artist precisely because of his status outside cosmopolitan artistic and social circles. Born in Philadelphia, Eakins studied art and anatomy in that city before leaving in 1866 for Jean‐Léon Gérôme's studio at the école des Beaux‐Arts in Paris. He settled in Philadelphia in 1870, where he painted just under three hundred works, mostly of eminent professionals, nearly all without a commission. A scientific model of objective observation underpinned his style. In portraits of rowers like Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), for example, Eakins calculated wave movement and light refraction, drew perspective grids, and sketched rudder positions. William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1877) emphasized a palpably real and respectable nude female model, underscoring the importance of the body in artistic production, regardless of genteel proprieties. An interest in photography, including assisting in Eadweard Muybridge's 1883 University of Pennsylvania study of human and animal motion, stemmed from the same aim of empirical analysis. His paintings of the nude male body in action, such as Swimming Hole (1883) or Salutat (1898), helped redefine masculinity away from the genteel toward an ideal of muscular physical fitness.

Eakins's commitment to scientific detachment affronted contemporary artistic decorum. The Gross Clinic (1875), a portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross, foregrounded the surgeon's bloodied hands and scalpel. The jury at Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition rejected it, though Jefferson Medical College bought it three years later. Eakins returned to the theme in Agnew Clinic (1889). As director of instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins thoroughly revised the curriculum, but in 1886, the directors forced his resignation for using a nude male model in a mixed‐sex drawing class. Eakins's later portraits, such as Amelia Van Buren (1891), increasingly showed tired, aging, or isolated figures, in shadowy light or slumping postures, again underscoring his disdain for artistic or social conventions.
See also Gilded Age; Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Johns , Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, 1983.
Kathleen Foster , Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 1997.

Wendy J. Katz