Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Louis N. Kenton (1900)

It seems unnecessary to say that Eakins never made any attempt
to flatter. His subjects are seen mercilessly, in a clear, revealing
light. Compare his bare honesty with Sargent's much-vaunted
"psychological penetration," his supposed uncanny ability to see
through the silks and satins to the person beneath. Sargent's
sitters are painted by a keen, completely cold observer who has
the knack of "sizing people up" and stating their obvious characteristics
broadly and brilliantly. But in Eakins' portraits we see
his friends and neighbors, people whom he had known from day
to day, in all their commonplaceness, their meagreness, their
limitations, their humanity. The psychological revelation is ten

times more mordant than that of Sargent, because it is founded
on a more intimate knowledge and a more intense sense of reality;
but at the same time there is far more warmth and human sympathy.
In the end one is baffled by these people of Eakins', just
as one is baffled by real people, feeling that one can never get to
the bottom of even the most commonplace of them, that there is
always some mysterious, irreducible element-perhaps their essential,
common humanity.
--Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, Realist, The Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin, March 1930

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Walt Whitman (1887)

As some of you know, I some years ago — a few — painted a picture of Mr. Whitman. I began in the usual way, but soon found that the ordinary methods wouldn't do — that technique, rules and traditions would have to be thrown aside; that before all else, he was to be treated as a man, whatever became of what are commonly called the principles of art.
--Thomas Eakins, 1891


It is likely to be only the unusual person who can enjoy such a picture—only here and there one who can weigh and measure it according to its own philosophy. Eakins would not be appreciated by ... professional elects: the people who like Eakins best are the people who have no art prejudices to interpose.
--Walt Whitman

But it is within four walls and on a one-to-one basis that Eakins the moralist is at his very best. It is relevant in that context that one of the few total failures in his career was the portrait of Walt Whitman that makes so unhappy an appearance in the Philadelphia show.

Everything was in favor of that painting. The No. 1 painter was faced with the No. 1 poet. What could go wrong? Even the photographs that Eakins took of the aged Whitman are unforgettable. But the painting just doesn't ring true. Whitman looks like a summer-stock Falstaff. That huge vacuous grin might reach to the rear mezzanine, but we don't for one moment believe that this is a great poet, let alone the man who took the whole of this country in his embrace in ways that are still valid.

We cannot doubt that Eakins was paralyzed by Whitman. He loved the work, he knew the man, but just for once he shuddered before the evidence of physical decline. As with the portraits of his father-inlaw, William H. Macdowell, he allowed a histrionic element to intervene. How much finer and more stringent are the other portraits in the show! 

--John Russell, "Is Eakins our Greatest Painter?" New York Times June 6 1982


In 1887, Thomas Eakins painted Walt Whitman's portrait. His Whitman is a moist-eyed old Falstaff. When I was young I used to see this picture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. All I saw was a twinkly-eyed, old poet. His florid color, wispy beard and eyebrows fooled me into seeing a Hals-like image of unvanquished jollity. Now I see the ruin in the man.

Eakins could never have painted the young Whitman.


--Michael Neff, "Thomas Eakins: Realism and the Workmanlike Path to Transcendence " Drexel Online Journal 2002

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)

What he sought with his searching brush was reality, because his cultivated intellect perceived that beauty rests in reality so deeply that nothing genuine can be ugly.
--Harrison S. Morris, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1917


Whatever objection a sensitive fastidiousness may find to the subject of his picture, exhibited here a year ago, entitled "An Operation in Practical Surgery," none could be made to the skill with which the scene was rendered.  It was a canvas ten feet high, and being an upright and the focus being in the middle distance, it presented many difficulties of a practical nature to the painter; the figures in the foreground were a little more, and those in the background a little less, than life size,  but so ably was the whole depicted that probably the reason why nine out of ten of those who were startled or shocked by it were thus affected, was its intense realism: the sense of actuality about it was more than impressive, it was oppressive.  It was impossible to doubt that such an operation had in every one of its details taken place, that the faces were portraits, and that a photograph would have fallen far short of the intensity of reproduction which the picture possessed.
-- William C. Brownell, The Younger Painters of America, Scribner's Monthly May 1880

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Carolus Duran (1879)

In an altogether exceptional degree he does give us the sense that an intention and the art of carrying it out are for him one and the same thing.  In the brilliant portrait of Carolus Duran, which he was speedily and strikingly to surpass,  he gave almost the full measure of this admirable peculiarity, that perception with him is already by itself a kind of execution.  It is likewise so, of course, with many another genuine painter; but in Mr. Sargent's case the process by which the object seen resolves itself into the object pictured is extraordinarily immediate. It is as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple matter of feeling.
--Henry James, "John S. Sargent," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1887


The first work to receive general notice was his spirited portrait of Mr. Carolus Duran.  The young painter is already revealed with his personal taste and tendencies in this

graceful canvas. Based on the same science of nature, on the same logic of vision, as his master's work, it already differs not only in brushwork but in the general qualities of feeling and taste. It is conceived in a less militant and magisterial vein of style and ornament. As a rendering not only of the structure of the sitter but of his air and manner, it equals any portrait that Mr. Sargent has since done, although it may scarcely reach the pitch of bravura attained in the execution of later work.  
--R.A.M. Stevenson,, "J.S. Sargent," The Art Journal  (London 1888)

To other painters such dexterity has come, if at all, after long labor; but it was Sargent's from the first. His portrait of Carolus-Duran with which he made his debut was hailed as a masterpiece of cleverness, and so it was; but alongside of the " Girl with a Rose " that followed,           it seemed labored and academic — as if he had been hampered by his master's presence. It is the only one of his works that looks as if it might have been done bit by bit and worked over; his other canvases have the air of absolute spontaneity. There is no under- ^ painting, overpainting, or glazing, there is no heavy body color, the paint, made fluid with oil and turpentine, is brushed on exactly as it should be and left. A head is ordinarily finished in a single sitting, for the purity of the tone must not be impaired by alterations or reworking.

What desperate hard work, what struggles constantly renewed the artist has gone through that he might paint with ease, he alone knows. 

--Samule Isham, The History of American Painting (1905)

For years past Americans have repaired to his studio in the Passage Stanislus as to a shrine. His pupils are Legion, and some have rivalled their teacher. Among them is John S. Sargent, the most brilliant and perhaps most striking of American painters.

One of Sargent's greatest triumphs, by the bye, was his portrait of "Carolus," which figured inthe 1879 Salon. The rapins of the Latin quarter, never over-reverent, said that the portrait represented Carolus-Duran not as he was at the time, but as he would have wished to be.

The young artist may have flattered his model a trifle, but the resemblance was close enough. He showed us a handsome man of five and forty, tall and erect; a rugged face, of a Spanish cast, crowded by dark masses of tangled hair; a thick mustache, curling upward; eyes full of will, vivacity, and intelligence; the whole instinct with strength and character.

"Ishamel," "French Painters Chez-eux," The Illustrated American July 1890