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Born on 25 July 1844: Thomas Couperthwaite
Eakins, Philadelphian Realist
painter, photographer, teacher. Eakins was the husband of Susan
Macdowell Eakins. He studied under Gérôme
and Léon
Bonnat. Eakins' students included Thomas
Anshutz, Henry
Ossawa Tanner, Phoebe Davis Natt, and Frederick Judd Waugh. Eakins died
in Philadelphia on 25 June 1916.— Most recognized for insightful, powerful portraits. Controversial teacher; a powerful influence upon Robert Henri. 1862-1866 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; 1864-1865 attended anatomy classes at Jefferson Medical College; 1866-1869 École des Beaux-Arts under Gérôme and Bonnart; 1869-1870 in Spain, influenced by Velazquez and Ribera; 1870 returned to Philadelphia, resided there rest of his life; 1872-1875 produced major sculling and sailing works; 1875 first teaching position at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; painted Portrait of Professor Gross (The Gross Clinic); 1876 The Gross Clinic rejected as a work of art [too gross?] but exhibited in US Army Post Hospital at 1876 Centennial Exposition; 1877 left Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but returned in 1878; 1878-1882 gained increasing reputation for instruction, for direct teaching of anatomy from human dissection; 1882 became director of Pennyslvania Academy of the Fine Arts; 1884 married his student, Hannah Susan MacDowell; February 15, 1886 four years' controversy over his didactic methods and use of nude models culminated in his resignation from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; February 22, 1886 founded Philadelphia Art Students' League with nucleus of former students from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Artsãthis small group was active for the next seven years; 1886 during ten weeks in summer and autumn lived the life of a cowboy in Badlands of the Little Missouri (southwestern North Dakota); 1888-1889 painted The Agnew Clinic; 1896 had his only lifetime one-man show (Philadelphia); 1899 death of his father provided an inheritance with additional financial independence; 1880-1905 worked extensively with photography, including 1884-1885 collaboration with Edweard Muybridge in Philadelphia on photography of movement; 1888-1907 lectured at New York Art Students' League; 1892-1908 produced a large body of work including boxing and wrestling pictures.
— Eakins was born in Philadelphia, where he would spend most of his life. From 1866 to 1870, he studied in Paris under French masters. He gained admission to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and entered Gérôme’s atelier on 29 October 1866. He enjoyed Gérôme’s meticulous drawing and exhaustive research for his oriental and historical paintings. As his training progressed, his letters to his father reveal a growing antagonism with the French academic’s preoccupation with classical subjects. Even though Eakins love for Gérôme never abated, he began to study on his own, and he later entered the atelier of Gérôme’s friend, Léon Bonnat, in 1869. He preferred the broad tonalities of Bonnat’s paintings to that of his former teacher, but it was in Spain that he would find his true artistic allies. While visiting the Prado in Madrid, he discovered the tonalities and loose brushstrokes of Diego Velázquez and Jusepe Ribera, both of whom would deeply affect Eakins’ art throughout his entire career.
Although today, Eakins is considered by many as the greatest US painter of the nineteenth century, his artwork found little success in either US collections or from the critics. At the time, people in the US preferred the bright colors and classical idealism of artists like William Bouguereau and Alexander Cabanel to the muddy tonalities and gritty realism of Eakins, as best exemplified by his 1875 painting The Gross Clinic. , which was, at the time, considered quite gross. In this painting, a surgical operation comes to life in all its reality: students look on with scientific fascination as bloodstained surgeons operate on a patient. The patient’s wound is displayed in all its graphic detail, and the chief surgeon, Dr. Gross, stands lecturing to the students, as a woman in the lower left covers her face in shock. From our vantage point a hundred years later, the antagonisms between Eakins and other academics of his time seem of minor consequence considering the unquestionable high quality of the best on both sides of those arguments, especially compared to the destruction of standards that was soon to follow. The re-appreciation well underway of all these great 19th century masters is long overdue. In 1876, Eakins began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy and focused on the fundamentals of drawing from the nude. He was forced to resign in 1886 because he allowed a class of students of mixed sexes to draw from a nude model. It was not until the early teens of the twentieth century, fueled by spokesmen such as Robert Henri, that Eakins’ reputation began to grow. By the time of his death his reputation as an artist enjoyed extensive re-evaluation, and he was honored by a memorial show in 1917 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
— Thomas Eakins was a one of the foremost US realist painters of the 19th century. Working independently of contemporary European styles, he was the first major artist after the US Civil War (1861-1865) to produce a profound and powerful body of work drawn directly from the experience of US life.
Eakins studied drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1861 to 1866. His concurrent study of anatomy at Jefferson Medical College led to a lifelong interest in scientific realism. Eakins spent three years in Paris from 1866 to 1869, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was strongly influenced by 17th-century masters, particularly the Dutch artist Rembrandt and the Spanish painters Josepe de Ribera and Diego Velazquez. These masters impressed him with their realism and psychological penetration. He returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and lived there the rest of his life.
Eakins's paintings depict scenes and people observed in the life around him in Philadelphia, particularly domestic scenes of his family and friends. He exercised his scientific inclination in paintings of sailing, rowing, and hunting, where he delineated the anatomy of the human body in motion. He painted several large and powerful hospital scenes, most notably The Gross Clinic (1875), which combined sharp realism — a depiction of an operation in progress — with psychological acuity in the portrayal of the surgeon, Doctor Gross.
As director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins introduced an innovative curriculum,including thorough study of anatomy and dissection as well as scientific perspective, which revolutionized the teaching of art in America. His insistence on study from the nude scandalized the school's authorities, however, and he was forced to resign in 1886.
During the later part of his career, Eakins's scientific interests were overshadowed by his preoccupation with psychology and personality, and in his art he concentrated principally on portraiture — studies of friends, scientists, musicians, artists, and clergymen. In addition to their masterly evocation of personality, these portraits are characterized by uncompromising realism and by a sculptural sense of form, which is evident in the strong modeling of the sitters' heads, bodies, and hands. Typical of his full-length portraits is The Pathetic Song (1881), with the standing figure of a singer in a rich silk gown silhouetted against a dimly lighted music room.
Although none of his paintings brought him financial or popular success, Eakins had a profound influence, both as a painter and as a teacher, on the course of US naturalism. His realistic approach to painting was ahead of his time.
— LINKS
— Self~Portrait (1902) — Walt Whitman (1888, 77x62cm)
— The Gross Clinic (1875) _ Eakins approached Dr. Samuel D. Gross [1805-1884] with his idea for a portrait in the operating theater at Jefferson Medical College. Gross was an innovative surgeon and champion of surgical intervention. This operation — to save a gangrenous leg by removing pus — is one he pioneered.
It is Gross's face that holds you, his forehead caught by light from above, a glowing white star fringed with silver and grey, and the black pits of his eyes, their darkness only heightened by the light. He has paused for a moment to explain a detail of the procedure to the students all around him in the shadows of the theatre. The painting does not freeze the moment so much as expand it infinitely: there is a massive, grand stillness to this imposing canvas in which you contemplate with awe the dominating, dignified figure of the surgeon, all in black, except for the shocking shining red blood on his right hand as he holds the scalpel like a pen, or perhaps a palette knife.
What is Gross thinking? There is something terrible, unutterable in the shadowed rock of his face. All the weight and responsibility of this moment between life and death is in his slightly disengaged moment of thought - this is what it is to be a surgeon.
Below him, an old woman, the mother of the young man on the operating table, claws her hands in horror, covering her face, her eyes. This directs us back to Gross, to his calm, heroic ability to look, to see. His eyes contain the knowledge of sickness, the history of pain. The assistants too look unflinchingly at the wound they hold open. At a remove, the audience watch and learn. Two figures lean in the shadows of the theatre's exit, reminiscent of the passages of a Roman arena. This is a modern arena, and Eakins portrays Gross as a modern hero.
The figures receding in the passage recall the figure in the doorway in Las Meninas of Velázquez. In its ambition and intellect, this is the Las Meninas of the US.
— The Agnew Clinic (1889; 790x1135pix)
— Starting Out After Rail (1874, 62x50cm) — Pushing for Rail (1874; 473x1135pix, 106kb) _ “Rail” in these two titles has no relation to trains, but refers to any of numerous precocial wading birds structurally related to the cranes but of small or medium size, having short rounded wings, a short tail, and usually very long toes that enable them to run on the soft mud of swamps; and constituting a distinct subfamily of Rallidae.
— Baby at Play (1876, 82x123cm) — Concert Singer (1892)
— Singing a Pathetic Song (1881) — The Pathetic Song (1881; 1105x759pix)
— The Swimming Hole — Miss Van Buren
— Max Schmidt in a Single Scull _ Returning to Philadelphia from his studies in Prance, Eakins quickly found himself as an artist, transferring the historical weightiness of French academic painting to a US context, painting sportsmen frozen at their oars, reflected in still, empty water, most brilliantly in this painting.
— The Biglin Brothers Racing (1873, 61x92cm) — The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873, 102x153cm) — John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874; 1074x708pix; 190kb) _ looks like a study for: John Biglin in a Single Scull with a wider background (1874; 821x1102pix; 231kb)
— Study "Negress" (1869, 58x50cm) — The Crucifixion (1880, 96x54cm) — Frank Jay St. John (1900, 61x51cm) — Professor William Woolsey Johnson (1896, 61x51cm) — Walt Whitman
— The Courtship (1878, 51x61cm) — The Chess Players (1876, 30x43cm; 824x1137pix, 135kb)
— The Dancing Lesson (1878; 921x1154pix, 221kb)
— Salutat (1898, 127x102cm; 1078x868pix, 138kb) _ Salutat is part of a larger prizefighting series that Thomas Eakins painted in the last years of the nineteenth century. Eakins had devoted himself almost exclusively to portraiture for many years before returning to sporting images, a theme he had pursued earlier in his career. The boxing series allowed him to study the male nude and seminude form in motion and repose, a theme he had explored in his photographic studies of the 1880s. Study of the nude figure was crucial to Eakins’s art, so much so that he studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College after attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Eakins went to Paris in 1866, where he studied in the studios of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Léon Bonnat, and the sculptor Pierre Dumont. After several years of study and travel in Europe, Eakins returned to Philadelphia to join the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy. As an instructor, he eschewed all study from casts in favor of the live nude, and it was his insistence upon the use of nude models for both his men’s and women’s classes at the academy that had forced his resignation in 1886.
Salutat is a full-scale genre scene, yet the individualized figures are a series of portraits. Among them are several of Eakins’s fellow fight-goers, including a sportswriter and several artists. The fighter is Billy Smith, a champion featherweight who fought under the name of “Turkey Point” Billy Smith. He posed for Eakins on several occasions, and the two developed a close acquaintance that lasted throughout their lives. The celebration of athletic achievement was a fundamental element of classical art, and Eakins’s Salutat explores that tradition in modern times. The artist’s prizefighter is a modern gladiator, standing in triumph in a hazy Philadelphia arena. He proudly salutes the crowd as he exits the ring. The painting has been compared to Gérôme’s classical, academic paintings of Roman gladiators in a grand stadium — a comparison underscored by the fact that the original frame for Salutat bore the carved Latin inscription DEXTRA VICTRICE CONCLAMENTES SALUTAT, the title under which the painting was exhibited at 1904 St. Louis World Fair.
— Taking the Count (1898; 1109x969pix) — Between Rounds (1899; 1078x865pix)
— 105 images at Webshots
