The rowing pictures of Thomas Eakins

Magazine Antiques, August, 1996 by Helen Cooper

At 6:40 P.M. the referee...fired the pistol,...the signal/or the start. Coulter and Cavitt got away handsomely, gaining half a length, as the Biglins seemed to be taken by surprise and were slow to start, and then unsteady. Coulter and Cavitt...held a good course, rowing handsomely at 41 strokes [per minute]...until Peter's Island was reached...and they went abroad, pulling off to the west bank, the Biglins passing them rowing 40 strokes....[and] beating their opponents by about 50 seconds.

The mass of people on shore, as well as those afloat, shouted and hurrahed until they were hoarse, and for fifteen minutes nothing could be heard but Biglins, hurrahs and tigers.(17)

Eakins had come to know the Biglins during their weeks in Philadelphia and his record books reveal that over the next three years he depicted them together in three oils and one watercolor and John Biglin alone in one oil (Pl. VIII) and four watercolors. The first painting in this series was The Pair-Oared Shell (Pl. I).(18) The composition has been reduced to essentials - the shell, the rowers, the pier of the bridge, and the generalized line of trees on the west bank of the river. Broad vertical and horizontal bands are held in tension by the figures. The brothers are on a practice run on the Schuylkill, about to pass under the old Columbia Bridge. In the lengthening shadows of the dying afternoon the mood is private and contemplative as the shell glides past. John Biglin is the stroke while Barney occupies the bow seat. They appear to be just past the midpoint of their stroke and their bodies and timing are perfectly matched. The hours of arduous practice are subsumed into a sense of balance and harmony. Like the river itself, the stroke is flowing and continuous.

The sky is rendered in loose herringbone brushwork, in contrast to the methodical, somewhat dryly painted foreground waves and reflections, which are composed of small horizontal strokes that become narrower as they approach the scull, allowing the darker underpainting to show through in places. The muscular bodies of the oarsmen are built up with glazes and impasto. The highlights on the figures and shell receive the most detailed treatment; applied with a pointed brush in bright yellow, they are raised and tactile. The mellow light that suffuses the painting is achieved through a general brown tonality, the result of the final glazing.(19)

The painterly character of The Pair-Oared Shell offers no hint of the extraordinary preparatory studies Eakins made for it. Like an oarsman preparing for a championship race, he was determined to master every part of the action through attention to the smallest detail. His approach reflected both his formal training with Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904) in Paris and his intellectual need to analyze and understand every possible aspect of a pictorial problem.

Eakins later told his students,

A boat is the hardest thing I know of to put into perspective. It is so much like a human figure, there is something alive about it. It requires a heap of thinking and calculating to build a boat.(20)