Preface

d’Harnoncourt, Anne

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Preface

Anne d’Harnoncourt

Thomas Eakins

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Centennial Exhibition’s vast diversity of art and manufactured goods, instruments and engines, from three continents drew more than ten million visitors in six months to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The year 1876 also marked the decisive emergence of thirty-two-year-old Thomas Eakins as a...

Author

Darrel Sewell (Editor)

PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100253

Preface

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Centennial Exhibition’s vast diversity of art and manufactured goods, instruments and engines, from three continents drew more than ten million visitors in six months to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. The year 1876 also marked the decisive emergence of thirty-two-year-old Thomas Eakins as a great and distinctively American artist. The scale of his ambition was revealed in The Gross Clinic (despite its relegation to obscurity in a hospital building on the fairgrounds), and the range of his talent was clear from all the paintings he showed that same year. His French academic training was now fully absorbed into a decidedly individual approach to his subjects.

To present Eakins’s work afresh, in this first retrospective in almost twenty years is, in itself, an invigorating challenge and an honor and delight to share with our colleagues at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, cities in which Eakins found himself, respectively, much at home as a student and admired as a mature painter. Second-guessing an irascible genius is futile, but it is hard to imagine that Eakins would not have delighted equally in the attention from his native city of Philadelphia, from the Metropolitan Museum, which mounted his memorial exhibition in 1917, and from the French museum that houses the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Léon Bonnat, and Thomas Couture, all of whom he much admired. The pleasure and adventure of bringing Eakins to Paris were taken up with enthusiasm by Henri Loyrette, then director of the Musée d’Orsay and recently named successor to Pierre Rosenberg as director of the Louvre. It has been twenty-five years since M. Rosenberg welcomed to Paris the major survey of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art that he organized with Theodore Stebbins at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and this will be the first monographic exhibition of a nineteenth-century American painter (other than expatriate artists Whistler and Sargent) to be shown in France. The opportunity to see Eakins’s work in a French context reminds us that he shared a lifelong fascination with the human body and its awkward beauty with his near contemporary Edgar Degas. One question to be explored by French viewers will be the precise quality of Eakins’s “Americanness” as a painter (as opposed, for example, to that of another close contemporary, Winslow Homer).

We are grateful to our colleagues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, its inimitable director, Philippe de Montebello, and H. Barbara Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, for their enthusiastic commitment to this project from its inception. To the distinguished array of the scholars who contributed to the catalogue, undertaking to disentangle many tightly woven strands of Eakins’s art while never losing sight of the complex whole, go heartfelt thanks and admiration.

From the outset of planning for the celebrations of the 125th anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, itself an outgrowth of the Centennial, the prospect of an Eakins retrospective seemed perfect, and Darrel Sewell (who has been devoted to the artist’s work for the nearly thirty years of his curatorship of American art at the Museum) embarked on a mission of rediscovery. Since he organized the last large retrospective for this Museum in 1982, scholarship on Eakins’s life and work has proliferated dramatically, fueled in part by the emergence into the public domain of Charles Bregler’s invaluable collection of Eakins material, acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1985 with the help of the Pew Memorial Trust. Important monographs on Eakins have appeared, including thoughtful studies by Gordon Hendricks, Elizabeth Johns, William Innes Homer, Kathleen A. Foster, and Michael Fried, while exhibitions have focused attention on individual works such as Swimming and on the series of rowing pictures. The English public was treated to a notable survey at the National Portrait Gallery, orchestrated by John Wilmerding. Great strides have also been made in the technical analysis of Eakins’s complex working methods, and his use of photography can now be seen as crucial to his technique and his composition.

To the extraordinarily generous lenders to this exhibition, all of whom are listed at the front of this book, we owe profound gratitude for their willingness to share beloved works of art with a new generation of museum-goers. A special salute is due to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and its staff not only for invaluable loans but for the alacrity with which they shared information from their rich archives, and to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The J. Paul Getty Museum, whose collections are especially rich in Eakins’s work. Dr. Paul C. Brucker, president of Jefferson University, and Judith Rodin, president of the University of Pennsylvania, graciously supported the loans of The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic from their respective institutions. Those great paintings continue to be a pride of the teaching hospitals where their subjects were revered professors.

Over the decades, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been fortunate in its staff, donors, and trustees whose fascination with Thomas Eakins has resulted in an unparalleled collection of his work and a rich trove of study material. Director Fiske Kimball’s early visit to “the widow Eakins” led to Susan Eakins’s decision together with family friend Mary Adeline Williams to give what remained in her hands to the Museum, and the passionate interest of his successor, Evan H. Turner, and Mr. Turner’s esteemed colleague, conservator Theodor Siegl, led to their collaboration on the first thorough handbook of the Museum’s Eakins collection in 1978. In turn, Darrel Sewell’s thoughtful and meticulous approach to his responsibility as curator charged with our Eakins holdings inspired the distinguished scholar Lloyd Goodrich to entrust the wealth of materials from his lifetime of Eakins research to the Museum in 1987. In the project at hand, Mr. Sewell has been most ably and enthusiastically joined by W. Douglass Paschall, Research Associate and Coordinator, Thomas Eakins Projects, who has catalogued and arranged the Goodrich Papers, provided much helpful information for the catalogue authors, and with the aid of his own expertise in photography, sorted out many intricacies of the various versions and prints of Eakins’s photographs.

The exhibition and catalogue also benefited greatly from the wholehearted involvement and lively intelligence of the Conservation Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not only in the handsome results of the study, technical analysis, and treatment of many Eakins paintings and sculptures over the past several years, but in the fresh insights into Eakins’s technique and uses of photography contributed by Mark Tucker, Senior Conservator of Paintings, and Nica Gutman, Assistant Curator of Paintings. As is often the case, the Conservation Department’s effort was a collegial one, also involving Teresa Lignelli, Associate Conservator of Paintings, and Melissa S. Meighan, Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, in research and treatments, as well as the skills of Joseph Mikuliak, Conservation Photographer, and Michael J. Stone, Conservation Framer. Suzanne P. Penn, Conservator of Paintings, oversaw the creation of a video devoted to the conservators’ discoveries about Eakins’s working methods, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Any major project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art relies upon the talents of a great many staff members, each of whom is committed to its success, and together with Darrel Sewell, I thank them all most warmly. Suzanne F. Wells, Coordinator of Special Exhibitions, has ably guided this international effort from its beginnings, working closely with her colleague, Irene Taurins, Senior Registrar. This book owes its handsome form to Bruce Campbell, its designer, and its complex contents were attentively orchestrated by the Museum’s Senior Editor, Jane Watkins.

Without the substantial financial support that makes such extended research and complex preparation possible, the exhibition and catalogue could never have assumed their appropriate form. We are hugely grateful to the corporate sponsors in Philadelphia: Advanta, which has been our partner in so many spectacular projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Strawbridge‘s, to which we extend a warm welcome on the occasion of their first sponsorship here. The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., gave a major grant at an early stage of the exhibition’s development, and The William Penn Foundation supported initial research. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ long-term support for exhibition and education programs of the Museum has once again been vital to bringing a Philadelphia treasure to an international audience, and we are profoundly grateful that they were generously joined by the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The catalogue is also supported by an endowment for scholarly publications established by grants from CIGNA Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an initial grant from The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In New York the exhibition was sponsored by Fleet.

Thomas Eakins loved his native city, and recorded the look of its rivers and environs, and the character of its professional citizens, with penetrating, affectionate attention. There is a reciprocal devotion to his art that continues to flourish among both public institutions and private collectors and feels remarkably fresh despite the distance of more than eighty years across which we look at his work. Among the citizens of Philadelphia who have loved and understood Eakins at his most brilliant and contrary are Daniel W. Dietrich II and his late wife, Jennie. To her memory, and to the passion of so many Philadelphians for their great native son, this book is lovingly dedicated.

Anne d’Harnoncourt
The George D. Widener Director
Philadelphia Museum of Art

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