The rowing pictures of Thomas Eakins

Magazine Antiques, August, 1996 by Helen Cooper

To Eakins, the great artist, like the champion tower, controls his own destiny through skill, knowledge, experience, and memory.

At first glance, The Champion Single Sculls seems as deceptive in its directness and simplicity as the apparent ease with which Schmitt balances his craft. But just as sculling, a sport of rhythmic and fluid beauty, is built on dedication, practice, and rigorous mental and physical discipline, so the painting, a studio production, was created from scrupulous observation of details and intensive preparation. Although Eakins later urged his students to draw with a brush, traces of pencil outlines are still visible in the bridges and in Schmitt's shell. In contrast to the precision of these elements, the foliage in the left foreground and in the distance at the right is rendered with soft, unarticulated strokes.

This canvas was Eakins's first homage to an athlete and it expressed his commitment to contemporary subjects, for rowing has been called the first modern sport. Before the eighteenth century, organized popular sports did not exist in forms recognizable today. The few professional athletes were individual performers in events without universally accepted rules, regular schedules, or established followings.(7) Annual races for professional London watermen on the Thames were initiated by Thomas Doggett, an Irish playwright and actor, in 1716.(8) Such competitions were launched in America less than fifty years later by professional ferry- and bargemen in the waters around New York City, racing initially at the urging of their passengers. The first college boat club was formed at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1843. As rowing regattas became popular across the country, offering an escape from an increasingly sedentary urban life, the number of participants and spectators grew rapidly. Stressing the value of the active life, a nineteenth-century commentator wrote,

No recreation, no method of exercise, no out-door or in-door sport, offers less temptations and more advantages than rowing. In truth, excellence as an oarsman is wholly inconsistent with dissipation or excess of any nature. Regular habits, constant exercise, open-air life, and plain food, are essential to every man who aspires to endurance, skill, and rowing fame. There is no more certain way of fitting the mind and heart for vigorous labor and the reception of careful culture than by putting the body in perfect condition. Let this work of physical culture go on until every American shall deem it as important to educate the body as to train and improve the mind. We welcome the era of physical training and rejoice that our young men can cultivate their muscular development, and still retain all the graces and refinement of life.(9)

In England rowing was practiced only by "gentlemen," whereas in America no one was excluded. In Philadelphia students, doctors, lawyers (including Max Schmitt), clerks, mechanics, and artisans formed rowing clubs, which made expensive equipment available to those who could not afford to buy their own. Races on the Schuylkill based on English models attracted thousands of spectators. The railroad and telegraph made rowing a regional, and even national, sport, bringing competitors and spectators together, broadcasting the results, and giving rise to half a dozen sporting weeklies.