Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins was born on July 25, 1844, in Philadelphia, and with the exception of four years of study in Paris and Spain, the city remained his home. Its school, public and private art collections, and community of artists, many of whom were recent emigrants from Europe trained in the academic tradition and familiar with new artistic styles, provided Eakins with an unusually wide-ranging art education for an American artist of his day.

When Eakins arrived in Paris in 1866 to continue his art studies, he was in the vanguard of young artists who would revolutionize American art over the next two decades, breaking away from the literalism of Hudson River School landscapes to emulate the figurative subject mater of European academic art. For the rest of his career, Eakins would remain the most dedicated American proponent of the painstaking, analytical artistic methods taught in European academies. Yet, as soon as he arrived back in Philadelphia, Eakins declared his independence from European conventions by painting subjects close to his own experience. Moreover, he did not behave lake his contemporaries. One critic described him as "much more like an inventor working (out) curious and interesting problems for himself than like an average artist."

Eakins was widely recognized as a formidable artistic talent almost as soon as he began to exhibit in the mid- 1870's. However, his scenes of working- and middle- class life found little support from critics and patrons. His decision to concentrate on portraiture after 1886 presented an even greater challenge for his viewer, who expected flattery and stylistic dash, rather than the intense scrutiny and introspective mood that characterized Eakins' portraits.

After four years of studying in Europe, Thomas Eakins returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and set up a studio in his family home. As did many of his Paris-trained American contemporaries, Eakins brought back a conviction that the figure was the most important subject for art. While his peers remained committed to allegorical, historical, and exotic genre themes, however, Eakins sought his subject's form the immediate experience of his life in Philadelphia. He began with the now-famous rowing, sailing, and hunting pictures, and made portraits of his family and friends. Even when Eakins undertook a historical subject, he chose to illustrate the life of William Rush (1756-1833), a Philadelphia sculptor, rather than a scene from ancient history or literature.

In the 1880's, Eakins purchased his first camera during the summer. He had used photographs from the other sources as aids for his painting in the 1870's, but the acquisition of his own camera inspired a period of intensive investigation of photography as a tool for making art. Eakins made scores of photographs as studies for a group of major paintings, among them Mending the Net, Swimming, and Cowboys in the Bad Lands. He also told students in his academy to take pictures to help them.

Following Eakins' dismissal, thirty-eight of his male students resigned from the Academy and formed the Art Students League of Philadelphia, providing him with a new forum for his life classes. He also taught at various art schools in New York, including the Art Students League, the Women's Art School of the Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design.

In 1890's began a series of disappointments for Eakins. He submitted The Agnew Clinic to the Pennsylvania Academy's annual