Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (1877)

Jean-Leon Gerome: Selling Slaves in Rome (1867)

The Story of Pygmalion and Galatea (circa 1890)

Phrynne Before the Aereopagus 1861






Thomas Eakins
Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing Mask, c. 1865-66 





Gerome is a technically brilliant but banal story-teller, Eakins is a profoundly seeking artist,
whose search represents at the same time a different level of human insight.

--Art History without Value Judgements: Some Recent Appraisals of 19th Century Art

Author: Alfred Neumeyer

In the case of Gerome's Chessplayers compared to
Eakins' painting of the same subject Ackerman again
comes to the conclusion that "It is almost the same . ."
(p. 243). For identical reasons as in the previous examples
Eakins' picture is, however, just the opposite-a com-
pletely integrated oneness of content and form in an or-
ganized whole.

To see Gerome reincluded in our picture of the 19th
century is historically desirable but his work must be
measured against that of an Ingres of a Meissonier and
only then can his place become clear. His compositions
usefully can be compared to an Eakins but at closer ex-
amination the superficial likeness reveal the deeper
differences of character and style.

Susan McDowell: Photo of Samuel Murray, Thomas Eakins, and Willliam O'Donovan

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.
		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
		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.

Three Ways of Looking at Thomas Eakins

Christopher Benfey NYRB March 2007
7

Thomas Eakins, The Professional Rehearsal (1883)

Eakins has iron-bound limits in execution, but very remarkable originality. He has boldly seized on subjects never attempted before by artists of his training and parts, such as a water-colour of the national pastime called "Baseball," an oil-painting of an expert sculler seated in his outrigger, a sportsman "Whistling for Plover," and a view of the Delaware river covered with such uncouth sailing craft as factory operatives can obtain when they wish to take a sail. The picture here produced is not his best, but it is far from his worst; perhaps "Chessplayers" and one other, "Listening to Music," surpass it. The people's note is struck again. Here is the stage robbed of all  glamour, the actor and musician in shirt-sleeves, ding and devil-may-care, who tinkle on the zither in preparation for the evening's work.   It is peculiarly characteristic for just that reason, since Mr. Eakins is always inclined to put things as badly as possible, as if he had a perfect hatred of neat and showy outsides.
==Charles de Kay, "Movements in American Painting: The Charles Clarke Collection in New York," The Magazine of Art, 1887

...all amateurs, playing for friends and family in middle class parlors. How heroic! How far from the musicians Degas was painting, contemporaneously, in the bustling opera theaters of Paris. How far away from anything like stardom or fame.

Musicians holding and cradling their instruments are the only embraces we see in Eakins, but the sacredness with which his circle must have held their music--their only connection with the Lyre of Orpheus in the otherwise mundane world of a manufacturing city.

One can only imagine the wheezes, squeaks, and missed notes: the combination of pluck and embarrassment, not only of the performer, but of the audience, which knows that what it has come out to hear is not first rate or virtuoso. In a way, it can all be so depressing. Yet it is also brave. It's how artists live who don't live in New York. Nowadays, we're almost all audience. Eakins' people make their own music.

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

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

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