Overview

Thomas Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons.

Career

• Thomas Eakins embarked on a career as a professional painter upon his return from Europe. Reflecting his love for sports, he created a large number of paintings of rowing scenes, of which ‘The Champion Single Sculling’, known also as ‘Max Schmitt in a Single Scull’ (1871) became the most famous.
  
• During the early 1870s, he also began painting portraits of people, his early subject beings his sisters and other members of his family. He also made several paintings of his fiancée, Katherine Crowell and her family. His portraits of young women playing the piano, children engrossed with toys, and a girl playing with a kitten on her lap exuded the warmth of intimate home life.
  
• Eakins was also a skilled photographer credited to have "introduced the camera to the American art studio". He obtained his own camera in 1880, and many of his paintings including ‘Mending the Net’ (1881) and ‘Arcadia’ (1883) were derived at least in part from his photographs.
  
• He believed that women should be accorded the same professional privileges as men would be, and thus his women students had access to male models who were nude but for loincloths. In 1886, he removed the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present and was forced to resign because of the ensuing uproar over his inappropriate behavior.
  
• He was a very popular teacher and several of his students were so agitated at his resignation that they broke with the Academy and formed the Art Students' League of Philadelphia in 1886 where Thomas Eakins subsequently instructed until 1893. He also taught at other schools including the Art Students League of New York, the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and the Art Students' Guild in Washington DC. He withdrew from teaching by 1898.

Legacy

In 1902 he was made a National Academician. In 1914 the sale of a portrait study of D. Hayes Agnew for The Agnew Clinic to Dr. Albert C. Barnes precipitated much publicity when rumors circulated that the selling price was fifty thousand dollars. In fact, Barnes bought the painting for four thousand dollars.

Eakins was honored with a memorial retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1917–18 the Pennsylvania Academy followed suit. Susan Macdowell Eakins did much to preserve his reputation, including gifting the Philadelphia Museum of Art with more than fifty of her husband's oil paintings.

On View

• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• National Gallery of Art East Building, Washington D.C.
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Brooklyn Museum, New York City
• J. Paul Getty Museum
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
• Columnbus Museum of Art
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

ArtWorks

Benjamin Rand

Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand is an 1874 painting by Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and depicts Benjamin H. Rand, a doctor at Jefferson Medical College who taught Eakins anatomy. In the painting, Rand is reading a book while petting a cat.The portrait was the first Eakins made of someone outside his family.

Between Rounds

Between Rounds is an 1899 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins, Goodrich #312. It is part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Max Schmitt in a Single Scull

This is the first major work in that series of paintings and watercolors. It is believed to commemorate the victory of Max Schmitt (1843–1900), an attorney and skilled amateur rower, in an important race on the Schuylkill River in October 1870. Also an avid rower, Eakins depicted himself pulling the oars of a scull in the middle distance.

Miss Amelia Van Buren

Buren or Portrait of Amelia C. Van Buren is a ca. 1891 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), now in The Phillips Collection. It depicts Amelia Van Buren (c. 1856 – 1942), an artist who studied with Eakins, and was called "one of his most gifted pupils."[1] The painting is considered one of Eakins's finest works.

Salutat

Salutat is an 1898 painting by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Based on a real-life boxing match that occurred in 1898, the work depicts a boxer waving to the crowd after the match.

Taking the Count

This depiction of a prizefight marks Eakins' return to anatomical studies of the male figure, this time in a more urban setting. Taking the Count was his second largest canvas, but not his most successful composition.

The Chess Players

It is a small oil on wood panel depicting Eakins' father Benjamin observing a chess match. The two players are Bertrand Gardel (at left), an elderly French teacher, and the somewhat younger George Holmes, a painter. The men are in a dark, wood-panelled Victorian parlour with a quality of light suggesting late afternoon.

The Dancing Lesson

This watercolor shows three male figures of different generations playing and responding to music. A framed copy of the famous photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad suggests the figures' familial relationships and emphasizes their emancipation. This watercolor gained Eakins his first award—a silver medal—at the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association exhibition in Boston in 1878.

The Gross Clinic

Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinic has an important place documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence of surgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.

The Swimming Hole

The Swimming Hole (also known as Swimming and The Old Swimming Hole) is an 1884–85 painting by the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), Goodrich catalog #190, in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Executed in oil on canvas, it depicts six men swimming naked in a lake, and is considered a masterpiece of American painting.