Thomas Eakins: A Master Painter Ignored in His Own Time
THOMAS EAKINS is one of the great American painters of the 19th century, or any century — but a master barely honored in his own time. He was born in Philadelphia in 1844, and lived nearly his whole life there. The first-born of Benjamin Eakins, a writing master, Thomas had three younger sisters: Fanny, Maggie and Caddy.
His father taught penmanship and calligraphy, and did freelance work drawing invitations and graduation programs. Benjamin Eakins also made a good living investing in Philadelphia real estate. He was generous to Thomas with money, and paid for him to sail to Europe and study painting there. Eakins managed to get taken on as a student by Jean-Leon Gerome, a prominent French academy painter and from 1866–1870, Eakins made the European tour, learning from the example of the European masters.
Yet from the start, Eakins was his own man. He was little interested in Impressionist painters like Monet, Degas and Renoir. Nor was he much influenced by the voluptuous nudes of Jean-Leon Gerome. He went to Spain, studied works by Velazquez and Jose de Ribera, and then, in 1870, returned to Philadelphia for good. Other than those four years in Europe, he was totally a creation of Philadelphia, and had no interest in living elsewhere.
Almost everyone who knew Thomas Eakins understood that he was a painter of rare perception and true artistic gifts. He was deeply devoted to his work. Many of his paintings are classic evocations of Philadelphia: Rowers on the Schuylkill River, for example. He was inventive and had technical skill.
Yet, during Eakins’ lifetime, his work was almost ignored by the art lovers and patrons of his day. During his most fertile painting years, 1870–1878, Eakins earned from all of his paintings a grand total of $140. He’d paint a portrait and the subject might refuse to pay Eakins’s fee. Many dozens of unsold paintings sat in his studio. Sometimes, he gave one to a friend who didn’t even bother to take the painting home.
How could this be? Why was this great American painter so ignored during his life? There were several reasons, but the main one was that Eakins was a realist at a time when the artistic fashion was for heroic painting or cautious still life, and when portraiture was expected to flatter the wealthy people who sat for these portraits. Eakins’ paintings were neither smoothly graceful nor flattering.
Also, Eakins was a stubborn man, of sometimes crude and eccentric tastes, who refused to be bound by Victorian notions of nudity. He was not likable or tactful. The wealthy art patrons of Philadelphia, those who might have helped him build a thriving business, could not approve of this man.
And in some ways Thomas Eakins didn’t want their approval, feeling it would come with strings attached, expectations that he’d have to meet. His obscurity allowed him to paint as he wished.
Thomas Eakins studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then studied anatomy at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia because he wanted to know the human body better.
For a century, people have split into two camps about WHY Eakins wanted to know the human body better. His friends and proteges believed he was merely being professional, as a physician might, and that if he asked models to undress, and treated the body without embarrassment or shame, that was only natural for a painter.
But many others felt that there was some kink in Eakins which made him enjoy corrupting the young, and some of the people who felt that way were people who knew Eakins well, including some in his own family.
The Centennial Exposition was being held in 1876; America was turning 100 years old. Eakins decided to paint a “major” picture. He chose to paint Dr. Samuel Gross of Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Gross was a man whose face, body and gestures Eakins knew well, and who lectured in an amphitheater which looked theatrical — a dramatic setting for a painting.
In “The Gross Clinic” we see Dr. Samuel Gross in a commanding pose, every bit the surgeon and lecturer. A seated woman is disturbed by the incision in the corpse that Dr. Gross has just made; but he does not see this. He is cool, self-possessed; making a teaching point. It’s a triumph of realist painting.
But “The Gross Clinic” shocked the few people who saw it in 1875 for its frank treatment of a human corpse, and the Centennial Exposition declined to take the painting. It seemed to most contemporary viewers to be in dreadfully poor taste, featuring a dead body exposed for our inspection, with no uplifting moral tone, no larger purpose. Jefferson Medical College finally bought the painting for $500 as a sort of curiosity created on the premises, but almost no one at that institution found it a fine piece of art.
Eakins had another habit which would have appalled the painting aficionados of his day, and which both Eakins and his wife took careful steps to conceal. He often used photographs to trace the outlines of his figures, projecting the photos on to his canvases, then making scratch marks to guide the later filling in of the forms. That suggests a lack of confidence — or a lack of interest in — draftsmanship, the classic requirement of a painter, to be able to draw and paint by eye.
But “The Gross Clinic” and many of the Eakins portraits that followed are exquisite because of something rarer than draftsmanship: they find the inner person — sometimes smug and self-satisfied, at other times shy or tormented. Again and again, Eakins found a way to present contradictory emotions in the same face.
Eakins taught — brilliantly, some thought — at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. But his insistence that students should draw and paint with a knowledge of the entire human body was difficult for some to take.
Also, there was a practical problem. Finding people willing to pose in the nude was hard. Some prostitutes would moonlight as nude models, but they were used to getting a hefty rate for taking their clothes off — much more than art students could afford. The sort of parents or older relatives who might be a source of funding rarely approved of nude posing.
When Eakins’ painting students complained they lacked the money to pay nude models, Eakins suggested they pose nude for each other. One young woman, when Eakins asked her to take off some of her clothes, burst into tears, left the studio, and complained to her father. This did Eakins’ career no favors. But he didn’t have to resign under duress from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts until February 9th, 1886 after he’d removed the loincloth from a male model in a class of female students.
Thomas Eakins died in Philadelphia in 1916, and was buried in West Philadelphia. That same year of 1916, the Metropolitan Museum in New York bought one of Eakins’ works.
In 1933, Lloyd Goodrich, an art historian who often worked with the Whitney Museum in New York, published the first monograph on Eakins, helped by his widow, Susan Eakins, and by his pupil Charles Bregler. Within 30 years, Eakins was one of the most highly respected 19th century painters in all of North America.
In 2006, Thomas Jefferson University was planning to sell “The Gross Clinic” because they could get $68 million for it from the National Gallery. A group of wealthy Philadelphians, outraged that this “masterwork” was leaving Philadelphia, bought the painting. It’s now jointly shown by the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, just the sort of institutions that once ignored Eakins.
A century after his death, Eakins is securely a master painter and we focus on the near-miracle of his work. The unsettling details of his personal behavior are just a sidebar to the story.