Thomas Eakins's 'Swimming Hole.' - 1885 painting in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Magazine Antiques, March, 1994 by Doreen Bolger, Claire M. Barry

In 1990 when the Amon Carter Museum purchased The Swimming Hole by Thomas Eakins (Pls. I, II), it acquired an outstanding painting by one of America's most important nineteenth-century artists and a work of art long admired by scholars and collectors. The Swimming Hole is perhaps Eakins's most accomplished rendition of the nude figure, the study of which constituted the centerpiece of his teaching program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.(1) The painting represents the artist and five of his friends and students bathing at Mill Creek near Philadelphia. Commissioned by Edward Hornor Coates (1846-1921), a Philadelphia businessman who was then the chairman of the school's Committee on Instruction, the painting was shown in the academy's 1885 annual exhibition but soon was returned to the artist by the patron, who exchanged it for a less controversial genre scene.

Within months, in February 1886, Eakins was dismissed from the Pennsylvania Academy, where his requirements for the study of the nude offended late nineteenth-century propriety. The Swimming Hole, closely associated with this painful moment in Eakins's career, was exhibited only once more during his lifetime, in an art gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1886, and remained in the painter's possession until his death thirty years later.

In preparation for exhibiting The Swimming Hole, the Amon Carter Museum undertook a lengthy and painstaking restoration of the canvas and located its original frame. Much new information emerged during the process, so that although the painting has been featured in virtually every exhibition and publication devoted to Eakins over the years, its appearance today is significantly different from what has been familiar.

Eakins called the picture Swimming in 1885 and The Swimmers in 1886, emphasizing not the place but the action and the figures. The familiar title, The Swimming Hole, was apparently first used in 1917, probably at the suggestion of Eakins's wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins (1851-1938). The date on the canvas, 1883, long assumed to be the date when Eakins began his work, proved to be the result of a conservator's misinterpretation of the actual inscription, 1885, which had been painted in a fugitive red lake pigment that faded to illegibility. Even more importantly, the recent cleaning revealed that the dark tonality of the landscape, the golden glow enveloping the figures, and the seeming flatness of the paint surface resulted from multiple layers of varnish, which had darkened and obscured the picture's rich brushwork and sometimes brilliant palette.

The Swimming Hole was cleaned by Claire M. Barry in close collaboration with the museum's curatorial and library staff, which assisted her with extensive research on the painting and Eakins's working techniques. Her task was complicated by the fact that there is no known photograph of the painting from the artist's lifetime and only fragmentary records survive of prior conservation treatments.(2) Moreover, Eakins sometimes reworked passages, added glazes, and toned areas such as the sky to alter effects of light and atmosphere, none of which are easily distinguished from later restoration.

In seeking a greater understanding of Eakins's intention in The Swimming Hole, Barry studied his related works, especially his oil sketches for the subject and his landscapes of the period, such as Arcadia of about 1883(3) and The Meadows, Gloucester of 1885.(4) She consulted conservators who had treated paintings by Eakins as well as art historians who had studied his work. Kathleen A. Foster, an Eakins expert, provided helpful information on the artist's technique.

A study of photographs of the painting over the years was useful in documenting certain changes. For example, the earliest known photograph, provided by the Art History Information Program at the Getty Foundation in Malibu, California, revealed pentimenti, particularly around the reclining figure, that were later covered over. A photograph from 1917 (Fig. 1), when the painting was displayed in a memorial exhibition of the artist's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, showed traces of Eakins's original signature and date; documented his use of dark glazes in the background foliage, which had already developed severe drying cracks; and revealed a drip mark to the right of the standing figure, most likely from some caustic liquid splashed on the canvas.

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The restoration revealed relatively little significant damage or deterioration not previously visible. Several layers of discolored varnish and overpaint were removed, exposing a rich and varied surface with brushwork ranging from the controlled, almost miniaturistic strokes forming the figures to the freer treatment of the landscape elements. One of the most difficult aspects of the cleaning was distinguishing the remnants of the delicate glazes Eakins had used from the later restorations that had attempted to repair the damage caused by solvents used in previous cleanings. The early photographs as well as examinations under a stereomicroscope and ultraviolet light proved invaluable in making these decisions. After cleaning, a few missing flakes of paint in the sky and water and along the edges of the composition were filled and retouched. The disfiguring drip mark, which had become more noticeable, as well as some of the more disrupted glazes were slightly toned, and the picture was given a more appropriate natural resin varnish finish.