Art: With Loyalty to Life

In 1914. two years before his death, the painter Thomas Eakins made a sale that overnight made headlines. It was an oil sketch; the buyer was Albert C. Barnes, just then beginning to use his great Argyrol fortune to build up his great art collection. The press spread the rumor that Barnes had paid $50,000 for the sketch (a better guess would have been $5,000), and suddenly Eakins found himself being hailed as “the dean of American painters.” His place in U.S. art has remained secure ever since, but true recognition came late for Eakins himself.

Though he was, along with Albert Ryder, the greatest American painter of his day, he was given only one one-man show in his lifetime, and it was not until he was almost 60 that he won a prize that carried any kind of prestige. Some of his most ambitious paintings were ridiculed, and so little value was placed on his portraits that several, including one of President Hayes, have simply disappeared. At one point, even his native Philadelphia seemed to forget him: when John Singer Sargent came to town and asked to meet Eakins, he got the bewildered reply: “And who is Eakins?” Viewers who see the big (103 items) Eakins retrospective* now at the National Gallery in Washington will be as puzzled as their fathers were before them as to how this straightforward, no-nonsense artist could ever have been ignored.

Fusty Classicism. Eakins (rhymes with makin’s) had the kind of whole-souled character that let him absorb rebuffs and carry on with total concentration. The son of a Philadelphia teacher of penmanship, he whisked through school so fast that he had an A.B. in 1861 at the age of 17. He loved to hunt, fish, swim, sail and skate, and he was good at all these sports. But he loathed the fusty Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where pupils spent week after week copying classical statues. To get a firsthand knowledge of anatomy, he took courses at the Jefferson Medical College, for a time even considered becoming a doctor. Instead, he went off to Paris to study under the French master Jean Léon Géróme. The basis of Geroóme’s teaching was the nude, as it was to be of Eakins’ own teaching later.

When he got back home in 1870, American painting was still dominated by the academic romantics, whose vast landscapes had a certain grandeur but also a basic falseness. Like Winslow Homer, Eakins concentrated on day-to-day scenes, but unlike Homer, nature itself was not his primary concern. His Mending the Net (see color) is an example of his attitude: the landscape interested him only as a setting for people.

Beautiful Wrinkles. Eakins was almost too honest for his own good. His great medical paintings, the Agnew Clinic and the Gross Clinic—the most daring works of their kind since Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson—so horrified the squeamish critics that some began calling him “a butcher.” His paintings of boaters, swimmers and boxers—superb studies of water and muscle in motion—scorned the theatricality of the Hudson River school. His portraits were so penetrating that few prominent Philadelphians would even sit for him. One man explained: “He would bring out all the traits of my character that I have been trying to hide from the public for years.”

It was not out of meanness, but out of a loyalty to life, that Eakins was so uncompromising. There are few tributes to youth and innocence more appealing than his Girl’s Head (see color). But Eakins also admired age, which meant to him experience and suffering. “How beautiful an old woman’s skin is—all those wrinkles!” he said. His technical achievements—his mastery of form, his sense of design and harmony—were impressive, but the richness of his art did not come from the skill of his hand or the accuracy of his eye. “I love sunlight.” he said, “and children and beautiful women and men, their heads and hands, and most everything I see.”

* With commentary by Lloyd Goodrich, Eakins’ best biographer.