The rowing pictures of Thomas Eakins

Magazine Antiques, August, 1996 by Helen Cooper

Eakins began the series shortly after his return from a three-year apprenticeship in Paris and six months in Spain. He explored all aspects of the sport he loved: single rowers in sculls, and pairs and fours in sweep shells; at practice or in contest; close to the viewer or in the distance; on a wide expanse of river or in the shadow of a bridge. The rowing pictures reveal his persistence, his characteristic commitment to modern subjects, and his adoption of images of popular culture into the realm of fine art.

Eakins's studies in Europe had taught him many things, but none more important than a belief in the truth of his own vision and confidence in his identity as an American. Unlike many young artists who returned from study abroad in the 1860s and 1870s to find the American scene uncivilized, crude, and hard to assimilate into art, Eakins was deeply proud of his native land and blended back into his emvironment as if he had never been away. He renewed relationships with old friends and resumed his active outdoor life of hunting, sailing, swimming, and rowing on his beloved Schuylkill River. He never again set foot in Europe.

His first paintings were largely autobiographical - direct and unsentimental portraits of family and friends, but for his professional debut he chose to show a work that was unlike anything he, or anyone else, had done before. Nine months after returning to America, he sent to his first public exhibition The Champion Single Sculls (Pl. IV), long known as Max Schmitt in a Single Scull.(1) Although rowers appear in earlier paintings, this was a work that had no real precedent as a serious subject in fine art. Most European boating pictures depicted gentlemen in yachting uniforms and leisurely holiday rowers. Eakins portrayed a known oarsman performing his chosen sport. In so doing he committed to canvas a type of image previously found largely in periodical illustrations and prints.

The first known American images of rowing are lithographs on sheet music of the 1830s written for New York City and Philadelphia boat clubs [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. By the early 1870s enthusiasm for the sport had grown to unprecedented levels and the bulk of depictions appeared in popular news magazines such as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1, 3, 5 OMITTED].(2) Rowers were the sports heroes of their day and they were widely known [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED].

The Champion Single Sculls shares with Walt Whitman's poetry a "determination to break down aesthetic barriers to the acceptance of raw-boned, athletic Americans as emblematic of the best qualities of the nation's citizens."(3) Informed by Eakins's own experience as an avid oarsman, this truly modern work was at once a summary of all that had shaped him and an extraordinary assertion of self and place. It projects a new kind of vision that is nonhierarchical, one concerned with objective recording based on observation, without rhetoric or sentiment. It was a fitting introduction to an artist who throughout his life defined himself as an outsider.

The painting commemorates the victory of the painter's friend and high-school classmate, the great amateur oarsman Max Schmitt (1843-1900), as single-scull champion of the Schuylkill Navy Regatta in Philadelphia on October 5, 1870.(4) This race among amateur rowing clubs drew four competitors rather than two, as was more usual. The three-mile course on the Schuylkill River ran from Turtle Rock to Columbia Bridge and back, and Eakins was present when Schmitt won easily in the impressive time of twenty minutes.(5)

Eakins chose to memorialize Schmitt not at the moment of victory but at practice on the river one still, clear autumn afternoon. Behind and to the right of Schmitt is the stocky figure of the artist in his shell, which he inscribed "EAKINS 1871" on the stem. The two oarsmen have passed each other, Schmitt now momentarily at rest, Eakins rowing hard. Signs of cultural change resonate throughout the scene. In the red boat in the background at the left the rowers in contemporary short-sleeved shirts and breeches contrast with the coxswain in Quaker dress. In the far distance a cloud of white identifies a steamboat, a counterpoint to the manual exertions of the scullers. A train puffs across the Railroad Connection Bridge, which is the antithesis of such landmarks as the old Girard Avenue Bridge, which is also visible in the painting. Sweetbriar, the mid-nineteenth-century mansion in Fairmount Park on the brow of the hill at the right, contrasts with the eighteenth-century building lower down on the right bank.

While The Champion Single Sculls is primarily a portrait of Schmitt and secondarily a sporting picture, it may also be seen as a self-portrait and a metaphor for artistic struggle. In 1868, writing from Paris to his father, Eakins described the "big" artist as one who sails a vessel by himself:

He's got a canoe of his own smaller than Nature's but big enough for every purpose.... With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature's sailing. He will soon be sailing only where he wants to selecting nice little coves and shady shores or storms to his own liking, but if ever he thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better shaped boat he'll capsize...(6)