Eakins, Thomas

born July 25, 1844, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.

died June 25, 1916, Philadelphia

U.S. painter.

After early training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1866–70), he spent most of his life in his native Philadelphia. He reinforced his study of the live model at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts by studying anatomy at a medical college. The Gross Clinic (1875), depicting a surgical operation, was too realistic for his contemporaries but is now seen as his masterpiece. In 1876 he began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy, but he was forced to resign in 1886 for working with nude models in mixed classes. In addition to numerous portraits, he painted boating and other outdoor scenes that reflect his fascination with the human body in motion. His interest in locomotion led him to the sequential photography of Eadweard Muybridge, and he began producing photographs and sculpture as well as paintings. Perhaps the most outstanding U.S. painter of the 19th century, his work inspired the trend of realism in American painting in the early 20th century.

Thomas Eakins, detail of a self-portrait, oil on canvas, 1902; in the National Academy of Design, ...

Courtesy of the National Academy of Design, New York

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▪ American painter

Introduction

born July 25, 1844, Philadelphia

died June 25, 1916, Philadelphia

 painter who carried the tradition of 19th-century American realism to perhaps its highest achievement. He painted mainly portraits of his friends and scenes of outdoor sports, such as swimming and boating (e.g., “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,” 1871). Because of its frank and unsentimental nature, the work generally acknowledged as his masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic” (1875), which depicts a surgical operation, was received with distaste by his contemporaries.

Early life and artistic training.

      Eakins was born in Philadelphia and, except for one extended study trip abroad and a brief trip to the West, virtually his entire life was spent in that city. From his father, a writing master, Eakins inherited not only the manual dexterity and sense of precision that characterizes his art but also the love of outdoor activity and the commitment to absolute integrity that marked his personal life. He did well in school, especially in science and mathematics.

      As his interest in art developed, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Concerned particularly with the human figure, he reinforced his study of the live model at the academy by attending lectures in anatomy at Jefferson Medical College and eventually witnessing and participating in dissections.

      Eakins went to France in 1866. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and studied with the leading academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (Gérôme, Jean-Léon) for over three years. Unaffected by the avant-garde painting of the Impressionists, Eakins absorbed a solid academic tradition with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his study, Eakins went to Spain late in 1869, where he was greatly influenced by the 17th-century paintings of Diego Velázquez (Velázquez, Diego) and José de Ribera (Ribera, José de). Perhaps reacting against the rigours of his academic training, he preferred artists who used paint and brush boldly to express their sense of life, creating what he called “big work.” In Spain, his student days behind him, Eakins undertook his first independent efforts at oil painting.

Early career.

      Eakins returned to Philadelphia in the summer of 1870. His earliest artistic subjects were his sisters and other members of his family and the family of his fiancée, Katherine Crowell. Redolent with the character of each individual in an intimate and personal domestic setting—pensive young ladies at the piano, children engrossed with toys scattered on the floor, Katherine playing with a kitten in her lap—these rich, warm portraits seem to express in colour and mood the essence of what Lewis Mumford called “the Brown Decades.” Close family ties were important to Eakins, and the intimate harmony of his home life was seriously disrupted and saddened by the death first of his mother and later of Katherine Crowell.

      Eakins resumed the vigorous outdoor life of his earlier years—hunting, sailing, fishing, swimming, rowing. These activities, like his family circle, provided him with subject matter for his art. A candid realist, Eakins simply painted the people and the world that he knew best, choosing his subjects from the life that he lived. Like the poetry of his aged friend Walt Whitman, who lived across the Delaware River in Camden, N.J., Eakins' art was autobiographical, “a song of himself.” Eakins, in fact, often included himself as an observer in his own paintings—sculling in the background behind his friend in “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,” peering intently at a surgical operation in “The Agnew Clinic,” or treading water next to his setter dog Harry and watching a group of students swimming in “The Swimming Hole.” Each of the early outdoor scenes, natural and informal at first glance, was, in fact, carefully composed on a perspective grid, with each object precisely located in pictorial space. Each image is further informed by Eakins' personal knowledge of the scene depicted. Thus colour, composition, and the play of lights and darks subtly convey to the viewer a fuller understanding of and feeling for the concentrated energy of a sculler propelling his boat through the water, or the taut equilibrium of the moment when a hunter standing in his boat balances himself, sights his target, and slowly squeezes the trigger.

Eakins' masterpiece.

      In 1875 Eakins, who had yet to become well known, decided to paint a major picture for the Centennial Exposition to be held in Philadelphia the following year. He took as his subject a scene that had become familiar to him—Samuel Gross of Jefferson Medical College operating in his clinic before his students. Gross was a magnetic teacher and one of the country's greatest surgeons. Eakins often selected moments that reveal multiple aspects of a scene and in this picture depicts Gross as both surgeon and teacher. Gross stands in the centre of a sombre amphitheatre, starkly top-lighted by a flood of cool daylight cascading down from a skylight above; he is dressed in black street clothes. He has opened an incision in the leg of the anesthetized male patient stretched out before him. While his assistants probe the wound, the doctor turns, one hand holding a scalpel covered with blood, to tell his students what he has done and what he will do next. At the left a seated woman, perhaps the patient's mother, flings an arm across her face, shielding her eyes from the scene, her fingers clawing the air in anguish. Her emotion and the note of pain and suffering inherent in the subject contrast strikingly with the cool professionalism of Gross, whose calm features reflect assurance and determination as well as compassion. The painting objectively records a realistic drama of contemporary life, full of feeling but free of sentimentality. “The Gross Clinic” is generally agreed to be Eakins' masterpiece.

      To Eakins' dismay “The Gross Clinic” was rejected for the art exhibition at the Centennial Exposition, and he had to exhibit it in a medical section. Critics and public alike responded to the painting unfavourably. While they could accept historical scenes of grisly martyrdoms or bloody massacres without qualm, “The Gross Clinic” represented blood and pain and suffering as immediate facts in Philadelphia. That was offensive and unacceptable. Viewers could not appreciate a picture that was neither entertaining nor ennobling but simply a frank statement of contemporary reality. The rejection of the painting was the first of many rebuffs Eakins was to receive from Victorian contemporaries who shared his world but not his values.

Mature period.

      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 “Nymph with 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' unrestrained use of nude models in front of mixed classes. The suspicious were unable to accept Eakins' 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 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 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 (Muybridge, Eadweard). 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' interests ranged widely—sports, anatomy, locomotion, music, sculpture, photography—in directions often reminiscent of his great French contemporary Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar) but without that artist's innovative stylistic concerns. There is no evidence, however, that Eakins was aware of the work of Degas. Eakins' art does demand comparison with that of Winslow Homer (Homer, Winslow), 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 man is at the mercy of a deterministic universe. Eakins' 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 man, through his 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' 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,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), and the first major exhibition of his work was held the following year (Metropolitan Museum of Art). But Eakins' 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 (Bellows, George Wesley) 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.

Jules David Prown

Additional Reading

Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (1933), is the principal monograph on Eakins. Other books of interest on the subject are Fairfield Porter, Thomas Eakins (1959); and Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (1967). The largest collection of works by Thomas Eakins is to be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There are also substantial collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Yale University Art Gallery.

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