Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art

One would have expected to find a great many European influences in the artwork of a painter such as Thomas Eakins.  In his youth, he studied in Paris at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, where he was instructed by none other than the renowned academician Gérôme. Afterwards, he spent several months traveling through Europe as he completed his own version of the "Grand Tour."  In spite of these expatriate wanderings, though, Eakins went on to become a quintessentially American artist as well as the possessor of a fiercely independent character that could have been produced nowhere else but in the United States in the late nineteenth century.

It's interesting that, after having returned to America, Eakins chose to remain in his native city of Philadelphia and never expressed any desire to once again visit Europe.  One would have expected that an individual who wished to pursue painting as a career would at least have relocated to New York where there were many more opportunities for recognition.  But Eakins, like many other artists before and since, showed more ability at creating art than at making money  He never learned to produce work that would sell.  Nor did he want to learn.  No matter how disheartened by the lack of acceptance and sales he encountered, he nevertheless doggedly continued to paint in the style that best accorded with his own aesthetic even if it were not the most marketable.

Eakins's refusal to conform carried over into his personal life as well.  His near worship of the nude human form would have been unconventional enough even in our own time.  In the staid Philadelphia society of the late 1800's, it was considered totally unacceptable.  It was Eakins's shocking lack of decorum that led inevitably to his dismissal from the teaching staff of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as to his removal as lecturer at the Drexel Institute.  His emphasis on nudity and sexuality may also have been a factor in the suicide of his troubled 23 year old niece, Ella Crowell, in 1897.  Her sister later claimed the cause of the tragedy was "the wearing effect of unnatural sexual excitements practiced upon her [by Eakins] in the manner of Oscar Wilde."

Non-conformist as Eakins was, it was only natural that he should have been an admirer of Walt Whitman who was also known for his scorn of convention and whose Leaves of Grass had been condemned as obscene.  In 1887, Eakins traveled to Camden, New Jersey, where the poet was living out his last years, in order to paint his portrait.  The two men shared a mutual respect for one another and became close friends.  It was Eakins who prepared Whitman's death mask after the poet's demise in 1892.

At the heart of Eakins's painting style was a rigid adherence to the principles of one-point perspective he had originally been taught by Gérôme.  There was nothing intuitive in Eakins's art.  He painstakingly worked out every detail of a composition before putting its components in a grid on the canvas surface.  Very often this resulted in a rigidity and loss of spontaneity that rendered the painting lifeless.  It became more an academic exercise than a work of art.  At its best, though, such careful planning created a realism that was almost photographic in its minute attention to detail.

It's not surprising in light of Eakins's absorption with perspective and the correct rendering of details that he should have become involved with photography.  A number of his platinum prints have survived, and it can be seen from them he was quite a competent photographer.  He also used the medium for the practical purpose of obtaining studies on which to base his paintings.  In addition, he was very involved with the early experiments by Eadweard Muybridge, another American original, that eventually led to the invention of motion pictures.  He and Muybridge worked closely together in Philadelphia in 1884-1885 during which time Eakins came up with a number of improvements to the equipment and methods used by Muybridge in his famous photographic studies of animal locomotion.

Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art by William Innes Homer is a fair and balanced biography that makes no attempt to whitewash the artist's numerous shortcomings.  In well written prose, Homer narrates the major incidents in Eakins's life and discusses in depth all his major paintings as well as the preparatory sketches that preceded them.  The descriptions of these works - accompanied by high quality reproductions of the pieces themselves - are insightful and display a thorough understanding of nineteenth century American art.  At the very end of the book, there is a telling quote by Robert Henri written shortly before Eakins's death:

"Who [Eakins] was in love with the great mysterious nature as manifested in man and things, had no need to falsify to make romantic, or to sentimentalize over to make beautiful."

This apt description could just as well apply to Homer's biography as to the artist himself.