American Realism. Gerry Souter

to his academic roots, Eakins produced a number of perspective plans, studies and sketches prior to execution of the oil. The final picture had the feeling of not being seen as a piece, but assembled from many different observations. This practice became an immutable standard. He went beyond the empty detail-saturated decorations of the academic realists to the application of their skills plus his own knowledge derived from meticulous observation. In exercising this conglomeration of observations and details, he did what good writers attempt – he edited out what was unimportant. As Ernest Hemingway once said of his craft, “What you leave out is as important as what goes on the page.”

      A watercolour titled The Sculler became his first sale in 1874 and critics who saw his assembled rowers were unanimous in their praise. His friend and fellow painter Earl Shinn introduced Eakins to the public in the magazine Nation in 1874 when he wrote: “Some remarkably original and studious boating scenes were shown by Thomas Eakins, a new exhibitor, of whom we learn that he is a realist, an anatomist and mathematician; that his perspectives, even of waves and ripples, are protracted according to strict science…”

      That same year also heralded his engagement to Katherin Crowell, the sister of Will Crowell, who was married to Eakins’ sister, Frances. The ‘engagement’ lasted from 1874 to 1879 and Eakins felt no obligation to consummate the relationship. It is suggested that the young woman was pressed upon him by his father, the family patriarch. In any case, she died of meningitis in 1879 leaving Eakins free to select and marry an up-and-coming artist, Susan McDowell, in 1884.[14] She eventually gave up her art career to clean house for Eakins and the live-in menagerie. His idea of marriage, it turned out, was not a love match, but the need for a healthy woman to breed and bear his children.

      The year following his engagement to Katherin Crowell, he painted the work that is today considered the pinnacle of his career, The Gross Clinic. It is a large oil showing the removal of a dead piece of bone from an anaesthetised man by a number of doctors in dark suits with blood on their white shirt cuffs in the operating theatre presided over by Doctor Samuel Gross. In the background, the wife of the man under the knife cowers in horror with her face away from the action and her hands in claw-like reaction. By today’s standards it is a mild enough scene, but in Victorian Philadelphia, those red gobbets of blood on the surgeon’s fingers and the scalpel blade caused revulsion. Dr. Gross, a dignified gentleman, is spotlighted with a deeply shaded face, his glowing dome of a forehead surrounded by a frizz of unruly grey hair, his mouth an unfeeling slit dragged down at the corners. Today, the painting is riveting and dynamic as well as heaped with Freudian pronouncements concerning Eakins and his relationship with his domineering father. In 1875, nobody wanted the thing, but it finally sold for $200. Society retreated from the artist as a wave draws back into the sea.

      Following the cool reception of The Gross Clinic, Eakins entered the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts as a teacher. He rose to the position of salaried professor in 1878 and was named a director in 1882. To his students he brought refreshing if controversial teaching methods. Harking back to his own rigorous academic studies, he banned sketching from dusty antique casts – the standard of the time – and following a brief introduction to charcoal sketching, his students plunged directly into painting in colour. At this time, he introduced photography as an artist’s aid.

      Photography had arrived from M. Daguerre in France about the same time Eakins was born. By the 1880s, it had been refined from a slow chemical-optical nightmare into a common hobby and documentation tool. Thanks to Richard Leach Maddox, photographs were made on a dry glass plate coated with silver bromide suspended in gelatin – negatives were no longer made on freshly coated wet plates that had to be developed immediately after exposure. This development allowed for portable full (20.3 × 25.4 centimetres), half (12.7 × 17.8 centimetres) and quarter (10.2 × 12.7 centimetres) plate cameras to be used by anyone. Film was exposed in plate holders by the lens and shutter to be developed later in a darkroom lit by a dim ruby-red lamp. Eakins obtained his first camera and took his first photograph in 1880. He also discovered the photographic motion studies of Edward Muybridge. Using multiple cameras firing in sequence, the flying legs of a galloping horse or the muscular arc of a pole-vaulting man were studied to see how the anatomy functioned. Eakins was enthralled and began using photos in his work and his classes.

      Photographs allowed Eakins to continue his practice of assembling a painting from many different sketches and studies, but with greater precision due to the photo’s detail. From his collection of more than 800 photos, many were used to add elements to paintings by tracing the captured action and transferring the pencil tracing on see-through paper with a rubbing on the paper’s opposite side. His photographing of nude figures in his classroom was usually done in the presence of a chaperone if young women were involved. He photographed his wife and his nieces who frequently scurried about the house naked and continually pestered female relatives to undress and pose. No other artist of his time made such a broad use of photography in his work and studies. Their constant display in his classroom probably had something to do with his later difficulties with the Philadelphia Academy.[15]

      This broad-based acceptance extended to the students accepted for his training. He did not distinguish between fine art and practical arts. He welcomed illustrators, lithographers, decorators and other applied artists as long as they took their work seriously. This ‘serious’ approach to art included joining in his appreciation of the nude figure. His classes included both male and female students and they viewed a constant parade of nude models in this era when a glimpse of a female ankle was considered scandalous. Eakins also delighted in leading his male students out to remote locations where everyone disrobed – including Eakins – and cavorted in sports and games or simple contemplation while sketches or photographs were made for future reference.

      In one instance, he talked a sixteen-year-old boy into climbing up to the Eakins’ house rooftop and posing nude, save for a loincloth, on a cross for the painting Crucifixion. In this work, Eakins managed to show the event, a young man dying in the sun, minus any religious overtones. The neighbours were sure the body was a corpse.[16]

      Eakins managed to accumulate a large collection of nude photographs of men and women featuring full frontal nudity. In his portraits of his female relatives he was almost always at them to pose naked or to shed some of their layers of clothing. This nagging often went on during the painting session and accounts for the wearisome expression on the faces of many of his female sitters. Sometimes the portraits were rejected or taken home and put in a cupboard.[17]

      Thomas Eakins, Taking the Count, 1898.

      Oil on canvas.

      Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

      Thomas Eakins, The Agnew Clinic, 1889.

      Oil on canvas. 214 × 300 cm.

      University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

      Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875.

      Oil on canvas, 243.8 × 198.1 cm.

      Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

      Thomas Eakins, Self-Portrait, 1902.

      Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm.

      National Academy Museum, New York, New York.

      Never the prude and always willing to help, when a female student, Amelia Van Buren, requested some instruction as of the movement of the pelvis, Eakins promptly dropped his trousers to show her how his pelvis moved: “I gave her the explanation as I could not have done by words only.”[18]

      This

14

Ibid, pp. 36–38

15

Jeff L. Rosenheim, “Thomas Eakins, Artist-Photographer, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” in Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994, p. 45

16

Edward Lucie-Smith, American Realism, Harry Abrams, Inc. New York, 1994, p. 35

17

Ibid

18

Homer, op. cit., letter from Eakins to Edward H. Coates, September 12, 1886, p. 166