Thomas Eakins: pictured lives: throughout his career, Eakins chose to paint individuals whose mastery of some skill, art or specialized knowledge defined their way of life. Opening in New York this month, a retrospective containing over 200 paintings and photographs reveals his own high achievement - Critical Essay

Art in America, June, 2002 by Carter Ratcliff

For Thomas Eakins, the art of painting was first of all a set of difficult skills, which he used to celebrate those who had mastered some other art or craft or discipline. His first mature paintings, from 1871-74, show expert rowers at the oars of racing sculls on the Schuylkill, the river that runs through the artist's hometown of Philadelphia. Pushing for Rail (1874) shows hunters and boatmen plying their know-how in the marshlands of the Delaware River. These are the wide-open spaces of eastern Pennsylvania. Eakins's 1875 picture of a baseball player at bat trims nature to the size of a playing field. That same year, he made his life-sized portrait of the surgeon Samuel D. Gross in the operating theater of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. As assistants remove a section of bone from the leg of the anesthetized patient according to a procedure invented by Dr. Gross, he presides, at once a recognizable individual and an emblem of practical intellect at work.

In Eakins's Victorian world, little beside the arts gave women a chance for high accomplishment. Throughout his oeuvre there are pictures of female singers and piano players. The grandmotherly figure in Seventy Years Ago (1877) sits and practices the modest art of knitting. She is dressed in the garb of the Jeffersonian period. A similarly occupied woman chaperones the nude model in William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77), Eakins's homage to a Philadelphia artist active toward the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. If Eakins was a realist, his realism encompassed not only the immediacies of sport and work, but much that was slipping into memory. His admiration for disciplined effort made him a moralist as well, yet he never denied the value of leisure. Swimming (188485) is among the indispensable images of Americans at play, along with George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) and Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip (1872).

A hands-on expert in anatomy, Eakins memorialized this interest in 1880 with casts of a dissected arm, leg and torso. These objects are fascinating, even elegant, and, of course, deathly. With Swimming, Eakins brings the male body to life in a stop-action moment on a summery afternoon. For all their precisely observed individuality, this picture's half-dozen figures are nonetheless cousins to the more generic nudes who live in the imaginary time of Eakins's pictures of Arcadia, from 1883-84. Toward the end of the decade, the artist took a trip to North Dakota and found a new but, in a way, still Arcadian theme: the cowboy on his horse in a frontier landscape.

Though most of his works are two-dimensional, Eakins sculpted since his student days in Paris. The Arcadian series includes a bas-relief, and he cast small bronzes of the four horses drawing the coach in A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand), 1879-80. A few years earlier, he modeled wax effigies of the main figures in his painting of William Rush at work on his Schuylkill River allegory. Miniature in size, these craggy forms are monumental in scale. Eakins used them as three-dimensional equivalents of preparatory drawings. All these objects, along with the Anatomical Casts (1880) and over 200 paintings and photographs are included in the Eakins retrospective that originated last fall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show opens on June 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it will remain on view through Sept. 15.

Twenty years ago, Darrel Sewell organized an Eakins retrospective for the Philadelphia Museum. Now, in light of new research, recent technological analysis of Eakins's canvases and the discovery of the Charles Bregler archive of Eakins material, Sewell has organized another. This is an impressive show, admirably balanced and with no familiar favorites missing. As one would expect these days, the catalogue is a behemoth. Happily, though, there is no curatorial filler. In four lucid chapters, Marc Simpson gives overviews of the four decades of Eakins's career, and in a fifth essay examines the artist's images of the American past. Other scholars discuss Eakins as a photographer, a teacher and, in the beginning, an American aspirant in the ateliers of Paris.

Though he took a few classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after graduating from high school, Eakins's art education did not begin in earnest until October 1866, when he entered the atelier of Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It would be months before the 22-year-old was permitted to move beyond charcoal drawing to painting with oils. In Gerome's quasi-photographic version of academic painting, tone came first. Only if the underdrawing's gradations of black and white were flowing smoothly was it permissible to pick up a brush and add color. When Eakins became a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1879, he instituted only one departure from Gerome's example, and it was major.

Gerome was fanatic about drawing. Eakins, however, bought a camera in 1880 or `81 and soon had replaced preparatory drawings with photographs. His enthusiasm for the medium led many of his students to master what was then the elaborate process of getting a photographic print to turn out right. Of the nearly 250 works in the Philadelphia retrospective, over half are photographs by Eakins, his students and young associates, and his wife, the painter Susan Macdowell Eakins. It is odd at first to see images by artists other than Eakins in what will stand for some time as the definitive Eakins retrospective. Quickly, though, one sees the point. Eakins lived at the center of a world devoted to image-making, and it is helpful to see his works interspersed with those of artists who belonged in that world. Whoever made them--and authorship is often unclear--these photographs have a particular charm when they show us the look of Eakins's Philadelphia.