Sargent, Eakins, and Rembrandt Peale, Self-Portraits (1906, 1902, 1846)

                                                                                 circa 1885

"I have long been sick and tired of portrait  painting, and while I was painting my own 'mug' I firmly resolved to devote myself to other branches of art as soon as possible."

Thus Mr. Sargent was reported as speaking shortly after he had finished the wellknown self-portrait in the Uffizi Gallery.

--The American Magazine of Art, February 1917

John Singer Sargent, asked to present his self-portrait to the Uffizi, performed the exercise with glacial detachment.

Laura Cumming, A Face to the World:  on self-portraits (2009)

I
In his 1902 "Self Portrait" (National Academy of Design), he wears a shapeless black wool suit. His face has a sallow color of a man who's worked too hard for too little reward. He shows a brave man, burnt out. One yearns to call his image "undaunted," but is forced to see that he is very daunted, indeed.
Michael Neff, "Thomas Eakins: Realism and the Workmanlike Path to Transcendence" Drexel Online Journal 2002




I have always found it a heartbreaking picture, as brutally honest as Rembrandt looking at Rembrandt,.  Eakins is left with few illusions.  He sees himself straight.  One feels that he feels that he has failed, but failed with indefatigable defiance.
--Philip Hamburger, "Eakins in Boston," The New Yorker 1982

My honors are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect, enhanced because unsought.
--Thomas Eakins, 1894, quoted in Elizabeth Johns, "Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life" Washington Quarterly 1987







by Matthew Brady circa 1855