American Realism. Gerry Souter

superb technician, Gérôme was one of three painters allowed by the Emperor Napoleon to open a Paris atelier with sixteen selected students under the reorganised École de Paris in 1864. At that time, in order to exhibit at the salons where patrons made their purchases, membership of either the École or Salon de Paris was mandatory. Gérôme was an ‘historical genre’ painter given to the romance of historical anecdotal works and costumed models that were more mannequins for the costumes and props than character studies. The fold of a silk dressing gown on a bare-breasted young lady, or the realistic curl of smoke from an exotic hookah pipe, were as prized for commercial success as the emotional content of the picture’s theme. The training in these effects as well as the chemical properties of the paints and endless drawing from plaster casts was rigorous.

      Eakins eventually moved on to the atelier of Léon Bonnat, whose pupils also included Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Braque, Aloysius O’Kelly, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Bonnat had a love for the anatomical precision of da Vinci and Ingres, which resulted in works of exceptional craft and technique, but lacking in imagination. Eakins made the most of his own anatomical studies in Bonnat’s classes. His Paris schooling also included classes at L’École des Beaux-Arts, which having had its ties to the French government cut in 1863 offered painting, sculpture and architecture to a broad, more diverse cross-section of artists. Some of those who had classes there included Géricault, Degas, Delacroix, Fragonard, Ingres, Monet, Moreau, Renoir, Seurat and Sisley.

      Thomas Eakins, Starting Out After Rail, 1874.

      Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 50.5 cm.

      Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, The Hayden Collection – Charles Henry Hayden Fund.

      Thomas Eakins, John Biglin in a Single Scull, c. 1873–1874.

      Oil on canvas, 61.9 × 40.6 cm.

      Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

      Eakins chose to ignore the radical Impressionists, but he also turned away from the ponderous French academicians such as Gérôme and Bonnat. In a letter to his father in 1868 that predicted some of his future difficulties, he wrote:

      “She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up and down the hills, especially up. I hate affectation.”[10]

      Truth and beauty – in the form of the nude – became almost inseparable to him as he learned to render flesh and anatomy with great precision. This proclivity for wedding the two concepts raised its head a number of times in socially unacceptable (in nineteenth-century terms) events during his career.

      From Paris, he travelled to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, ending up in Spain to study the realism of Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera in the Prado. While there he tried his hand at a large canvas, A Street Scene in Seville. The painting of three street performers displays at once Eakins’ independence of mind by depicting two of the performers playing the horn and drum sitting in the shade of a scarred stucco wall while the young girl dancer stands forward in the sun on the brick street. The sun strikes her white dress and barely glances off her accompanists. His use of light and shadow gives the picture a captured immediacy of a quick photographic visualisation – another prediction of things to come.

      His tour of Europe and subsequent studies seemed to fix his artist style in amber as he tossed aside the works of the Old Masters in a letter to his sister Frances: “I went next to see the picture galleries. There must have been half a mile of them, and I walked all the way from one end to the other, and I never in my life saw such funny old pictures. I’m sure my taste has much improved, and to show, I’ll make a point never to look hereafter on American Art except with disdain.”[11]

      Having already dismissed the Impressionists Monet, Degas, Seurat and Renoir and the growing ‘modern’ movement, all that were left were the academicians: Gustave Doré, Ernest Messonier, Thomas Couture and his teachers, Gérôme and Bonnat. From them he had amassed an impressive arsenal of flashy techniques and a definite aversion to their commercial success with historic and romantic anecdotes. Style wise, he had gleaned from Velázquez a love of the Baroque.

      This seventeenth-century art form had dealt primarily with religious works, but populist paintings using ordinary people – much like the Russian icons showing plain villagers engaging in traditional religious ceremonies – appeared from the likes of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Diego Velázquez. Eakins might have seen Dinner at Emmaus at the Prado, which shows a serving girl gathering dishware that would be used in Christ’s Last Supper. The artist’s choice of painting a serving girl instead of the gathering disciples in the next room carries the ring of truth and brings the ordinary person closer to the religious event. Velázquez’ use of chiaroscuro and the window light touching the girl’s cap, pots and jugs strengthens the realism and reinforces the populist inclusion. This Baroque interpretation tapped into a trend showing up in American art that Eakins discovered when he packed his bags and returned in July 1870. But in Eakins’ hands, the Baroque of the seventeenth century and fidelity to the observed or imagined scene created by Velázquez would take on a definite American character.

      “I shall seek to achieve my broad effect from the very beginning,” he declared.[12]

      Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, c. 1884–1885.

      Oil on canvas, 69.8 × 92.7 cm.

      Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

      Thomas Eakins, Between Rounds, c. 1898–1899.

      Oil on canvas, 127.3 × 101.3 cm.

      Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams.

      Eakins retuned to Philadelphia and opened a studio on Mount Vernon Street. The location was only a short distance from the three-storey brick home his father had built at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, a tall narrow, deep building that housed a warren of rooms and curiously-placed stairways that became symbolic of the lives that were lived out beneath its roof. Allowing for brief sojourns, the structure became his anchor, refuge and claustrophobic dominion for the rest of his life. The house had a constantly shifting population including friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, wives and husbands, servants and babies. The world was kept out behind closed shutters summer and winter. Heat came from fireplaces and there was no plumbing, so water for all uses had to come from a hand pump in the back yard. Walls were painted in dark chocolate shades and decoration followed the usual chaotic Victorian pattern of overstuffed pieces, drapes and brasses needing a good polish. The air was musty, warm and rank with the smells of bodies, bedclothes, cooking, gas from lighting fixtures, wood ash and the lingering piquant scent from under-bed porcelain ‘thunder-jugs’ used in the night rather than make a trip over cold floors to the privy. Add to this a small zoo of animals: Bobby the monkey, dogs and at least one cat, all scampering and thrashing up and down stairs, in and out of rooms with their human internee counterparts.[13]

      Eakins began his assault on fame right away with his painting Max Schmitt on a Single Scull – a man bare to the waist sitting at the oars in long narrow racing scull boat on a bend of the Schuylkill River. He looks back at the viewer as though a photographer had just hollered across, “Smile!” He is down river from a Roman-style stone-arched lift-bridge. Sports intrigued the artist and he went on to explore

10

William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art, Abbeville Press, 1992, p. 36

11

Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, His Life and Work, Vol.1 Ams Pr. Inc., June 1977, p.27

12

H. Barbara Weinberg, Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001

13

Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed – The Secret Life of an American Artist, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, pp. 3–5