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

There are shots of cats and dogs and children on lawns and front porches. Eakins appears often, at work in his studio or gazing into the portraitist's lens with a slightly glowering touch of impatience. Among the many photographs of nude figures, some are multiple exposures with the investigatory look of Eadweard Muybridge's photo-sequences. Eakins knew and admired these studies of "human and animal locomotion," yet he felt that Muybridge's method could be improved. In his catalogue essay, curator W. Douglass Paschall does a splendid job of explaining how Eakins and his patron, Fairman Rogers, revised Muybridge's procedures for the sake of greater accuracy in rendering the homes' gaits in A May Morning in the Park (1879-80). (1) The story is complicated by Eakins's aims. He didn't want to know merely how horses move their hooves. As a painter, he focused on appearances, so he had to find a fit between the results of his investigation and the needs of his art.

Someone in Eakins's circle--probably Samuel Murray, a student and later a collaborator on sculptural projects--achieved a semi-Arcadian effect in the early 1890s with a picture of the undressed and portly Eakins astride Billy, the family home. In a similarly leafy setting and possibly on the same afternoon, Eakins photographed his wife, nude, her back to the camera. As she leans with sinuous insouciance against Billy's flank, her unfeigned ease fills the image with sexual heat. Not every sexually charged photograph is sexy. Sometime in the mid-1880s an unknown photographer took a picture of Eakins with a woman in his arms. Both are nude. He struggles to keep his balance; she languishes, her head and arms flung back. Awkward in its defiance of taboo, this image conjures up the aura of scandal that hovered around Eakins's high-minded insistence that all students, female no less than male, should have the chance to work from nude models.

The Pennsylvania Academy insisted that the males wear loincloths. Eakins went along with the policy until, one day in 1886, he pulled a model's cloth aside to demonstrate a detail of anatomy. Or so he said. For several years, a few students and their parents had been complaining that Eakins's interest in the body was not entirely scientific. Now a furor erupted, and he was dismissed from the academy. When Eakins left, 38 students followed. Within a month, they had founded the Art Students' League of Philadelphia, so their teacher could carry on life-drawing classes as usual.

During the next decade, he took teaching jobs in New York, at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. He did a bit of lecturing in Washington, D.C. In 1897 the Pennsylvania Academy purchased The Cello Player (1896), Eakins's portrait of the virtuoso Rudolf Henning performing. Having slowly acquired a national reputation, Eakins was indispensable to Philadelphia's idea of itself as a cultivated metropolis. The academy could hardly afford to ignore him. As the new century began, Eakins was invited to serve on the jury of the academy's annual exhibition. In 1904 he received that institution's highest honor, the Temple Gold Medal. Three years later, the American Art Society of Philadelphia awarded him another gold medal.