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