| Eakins graduated fifth in his class of fourteen. Many of his classmates enlisted to serve in the Union Army, but Benjamin Eakins, endorsing his son's wish to become an artist, paid for a substitute. |  | ||||||||||
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| Eakins lived in a neighborhood surrounded by Quaker families. Quaker culture was part of the normal life of Philadelphia. It's likely Eakins knew many Quakers that were exempt from service in the Civil War because of their religious faith. | | AMY B. WERBEL, Ph.D. Art Historian, St. Michael's College | ||||||||
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| The fact that an exemption was secured for him not to join the Union Army -- I think would have been the obvious choice -- was not so unusual. It probably strikes the modern mind as maybe cowardice or maybe special treatment. But it was done frequently and the usual sort of exchange was 300 dollars. And sometimes a replacement, a specific replacement often was secured. He indeed was paid and he went in place of the individual. | | THOMAS J. SCHLERETH, Ph.D Historian, University of Notre Dame | ||||||||
PBS Website (http://www.pbs.org/eakins/t_1857_civil_war.htm)
'Lincoln and Grant', bronze sculptures by William Rudolf O'Donovan (men) & Thomas Eakins (horses), 1893-1894, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, New York City
William Rudolf O'Donovan and his bust of Walt Whitman (May 1891). Photograph byThomas Eakins.
One might have thought that so much new biographical data would have helped to resolve any lingering debates surrounding Eakins’s life, personality, and achievement. But three recent biographies—one by a writer on crime, one by a distinguished historian, and one by a respected specialist in American art—suggest the opposite. It is unsettling to read the books in succession, for they seem to describe three quite different men: a happily married heterosexual; a closeted homosexual married to a lesbian; and a neurotic victim of incest who felt compelled to remove his clothes in public. It is difficult to think of a parallel case of such divergent accounts of a well-known life.
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