EAKINS, Thomas

(b. 1844 Philadelphia, d. 1916 Philadelphia)

American painter, photographer, and sculptor, best known for his precise, exacting paintings in the tradition of the Barbizon School and Velázquez. He studied with Gérome and others in Paris from 1866-1869, but returned to Philadelphia in 1870 where he painted local figures and scenes that emphasized emotional truth and visual fact. He visited Spain, where he was drawn to the works of Velázquez. His interest in science led to probably his best-known painting, The Gross Clinic (1875), showing the famous surgeon in the operating theater. The picture shocked contemporaries with its frank depiction of blood.

Eakins taught at the Philadelphia Academy of the Arts from 1876-1878, reforming the teaching methods and giving priority to painting from live nude models as oppose to drawing from plaster casts. He was forced to resign in 1886 for working with nude models in mixed classes. In addition to numerous portraits, he painted boating and other outdoor scenes that reflect his fascination with the human body in motion.

Eakins was one of the first American photographers to explore the nude, in anatomy and motion studies and artistic studies of the human form. The latter often reflected a latent sexuality, which, along with his reliance on nude models in teaching, precipitated the scandals that plagued his life.

Although he never achieved commercial success during his lifetime because of his realism and his resistance to prevailing genteel cosmopolitanism, Thomas Eakins was arguably the finest nineteenth-century American painter.

Clara

The sitter of this painting is Clara Janney Mather, one of Eakins’s pupils. Two sketches showing her standing and wearing a black dress were to serve as preparatory studies for a full portrait that was in fact never painted. Eakins painted this portrait instead.

After his return to the United States in 1872 from Paris, where he attended the art classes of G�r�me, Eakins became one of his country’s leading Realist artists.

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The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)

In this complex, haunting work, Eakins’s passion for sports is suffused with a lyrical response to subtle qualities of light and to the rhythmic placement of forms in deep space. A keen rower, Eakins produced several boating pictures. This painting commemorates the victory of Max Schmitt (1843–1900), an attorney and skilled amateur rower, in an important race held on the Schuylkill River in October 1870. Eakins depicted himself in a scull beyond Schmitt in the middle distance.

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