Eakins in Philadelphia

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

This autumn devotees of the American artist Thomas Eakins will want to make haste to Philadelphia where two impressive exhibitions of his work are on view. As a native son of Philadelphia, Ealtins was selected as the subject of a large retrospective exhibition organized to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first large show devoted to Eakins in nearly twenty years, it comprises 70 paintings along with watercolors, drawings, sculptures, and 120 photographs (by Eakins and his circle). Entitied Thomas Eakins: American Realist, it is on view at the museum from October 7 to January 6, 2002. The exhibition will then travel to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and later to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The second exhibition, a perfect complement to the first, is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Eakins was a student, professor, and finally the director of the school, until an acrimonious dispute ended in his dismissal. It is on view from October 6 through January 6, 2002, and is entitled Process on Paper: Works from Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection. The show features more than thirty drawings and oil studies from Bregler's collection of hundreds of objects, including oil sketches, drawings, plaster sculptures, albums of photographs, diaries, letters, account books, and glass negatives by Eakins, his wife Susan Macdowell Eakins, Samuel Murray, Bregler himself, and other members of Eakins's circle. Oral tradition has it that Bregler, who studied at the academy under Ealtins, had rescued this material, all of which had been slated to be burned upon the death of Eakins's widow The Bregler Collection was accessioned by the academy in 1985.

The paintings that form the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Museum exhibition span Eakins's career and include examples of his various subjects: his hauntingly perceptive portraits; his engaging depictions of athletes rowing, sailing, fishing, playing baseball, and boxing; and his group portraits, the most famous of which are The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic. Photographs play a major role in the show, and as the catalogue relates, while Susan Eakins long insisted that her husband did not typically use photographs as a point of departure for his paintings, the discovery of the photographs in the Bregler Collection suggests otherwise. Eakins in fact used a combination of photographs, drawings, oil sketches, and occasionally small wax models when painting in oil. In preparation for this exhibition Mark S. Tucker and Nica Gutman, both conservators at the Philadelphia Museum, discovered two more techniques that Eakins used in order to transfer photographic studies onto canvas. Using three works--two entitied Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River and Mending the Net--they found underdrawings in graphite directly related to existing photographs. They concluded that Eakins had projected photographs (for he often used more than one) onto the canvas, probably using a magic lantern or a similar device. It was possible to match parts of the paintings to different photographs and learn how he combined them in his underdrawing on the canvas. Eakins used photographs in the preparation and execution of his paintings as early as 1872, and possibly before. It is known that he used the projection method from as early as l874 and to as late as 1885, when he painted Swimming the last canvas in which he used this technique.

The other technique Tucker and Gutman discovered is a series of reference marks made with a needlelike stylus, which is evident on Mending the Net. Eakins did this as he was painting, for there is no underdrawing on this canvas.

Tucker and Gutman have concluded that Eakins used the projecting technique principally for figures, and small ones at that. For larger canvases he seems to have used the conventional process known as squaring when enlarging the composition from a photograph, or drawing, to the canvas. But photographs enabled far greater verisimilitude, and for Eakins, whose work is so incredibly realistic, this must have been an enormous draw. Remembering that he could, and often did, edit, combine, or make substitutions, his creative process, especially important when converting black-and-white images into colors, was a complex and cerebral undertaking for Eakins.

What makes the exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy so compelling is the fact that, while Eakins drew incessantly, he never produced a drawing that he wanted anyone else to see. Eakins's father was a calligrapher and penmanship instructor who no doubt was a considerable influence. Eakins studied mechanical and perspective drawing in high school, and at the Pennsylvania Academy between 1862 and 1866 he drew from plaster casts of classical sculpture and from models. He also was enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris for three years. Finally between 1878 and 1886, when he was a professor and then director of the academy school, drawing was included in his radical approach to teaching art. On view at the academy are examples of mechanical, anatomical, and compositional drawings, and what is known as the Spanish Sketchbook, dating to his years as a student in Europe.