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Preface
Amy Werbel
Description: Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
In 1985, I had the good fortune to sit in Lloyd Goodrich’s living room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We drank tea, and for most of the interview his dry lips inhaled deeply on a cigarette that looked as though it had been planted there for several decades. He was an old man then, and I was a senior in college, working on an honors thesis about some drawings attributed to Thomas Eakins. He helped me with my project, and toward the end of the hour he looked into my eyes and advised me not …
Author
Amy Werbel
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Amy B. Werbel
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00168.002
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15019
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Preface
In 1985, I had the good fortune to sit in Lloyd Goodrich’s living room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We drank tea, and for most of the interview his dry lips inhaled deeply on a cigarette that looked as though it had been planted there for several decades. He was an old man then, and I was a senior in college, working on an honors thesis about some drawings attributed to Thomas Eakins. He helped me with my project, and toward the end of the hour he looked into my eyes and advised me not to listen to all the rumors about Eakins. At that point, I hadn’t come into contact with too many rumors, but years later I read them all—many in the files he had collected during years spent interviewing the surviving relatives, portrait subjects, and students who knew the artist.
Goodrich was old school. His world was John F. Kennedy, not Bill Clinton. He dutifully recorded all those stories about Eakins, flattering and not so flattering, but he didn’t believe the unpleasant ones, or maybe he just didn’t believe that they should be written about in detail. Many historians who love Eakins’ paintings still wish for an era in which his accomplishments could be discussed without having to drag along the baggage of the scandals that dogged his life and followed him after death.
There is no doubt that Eakins was, and still is, a lightning rod for critical interpretation. He was smart enough to intuit many of the cultural land mines in his beloved hometown of Philadelphia—but then subversive enough to find ways to step on each one. The land mines were composed of assumptions and expectations about art, education, anatomy, gender, and sexuality. Mostly they consisted of conventions regarding the body—who could be looked at, studied, dissected, photographed, and depicted, by whom, and how. The problem of nudity, established in the colonial era, was never more difficult for American artists than it was in the late nineteenth century.
Eakins’ response to the problems that faced American figure painters in this era often amounted to straightforward confrontation. He refused to limit his probing of humanity, or his teaching of art, using categories of class, race, sex, or age. Eakins instead intensely studied all the bodies around him with the eyes of a trained anatomist, and depicted them without hyperbole or garnish. At the core of the artist’s accomplishment is a profound engagement with the body—not aestheticized and contextualized as many of his colleagues liked to see it, but as it is a feat of biology and engineering. For Goodrich, that vision and skill made Eakins a worthy subject for elevation to an emerging pantheon of American artists he helped to invent.
Today, historians are less interested than Goodrich was in nationalistic elevation. We live in a time of fallen heroes, and Eakins is a good one because he still manages to step on those land mines—even the ones he couldn’t possibly have foreseen. In recent years, he has been cast by scholars as victim of a paranoid Oedipal complex, sexual harasser, pervert, philanderer, abusive uncle, misogynist, repressed homosexual, and slandered innocent. One of the great benefits of studying Eakins’ art and life is that by looking at all these claims about a single man, some stretching back one hundred and twenty years, we can find the boundaries of propriety and perversion assumed by their authors, and see how those boundaries have changed. Few artists create works that probe and critique, and even fewer live their lives in a way that forces those around them to do so—Thomas Eakins managed to do both.
This book is largely about digging; it starts with Charles Willson Peale and his Exhumation of the Mastodon, uncovers the bones presented to male and female students of medicine and art in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, explores the grave-robbing scandals that rocked the city in 1882 and 1883, and concludes by unearthing the underlying values that guided Eakins through the difficult choices and moments he faced during his life. Digging, in a sense, is always what historians do; we dig up historical facts in order to shed light on them and bring attention to those moments that should not be forgotten as we move forward and contribute to the history of our own time.
The question of what Eakins actually did in the intimate moments of his life, and with whom, is of course fundamentally unanswerable. What we can determine is what such actions would have meant, and how scandal—and the art that provoked it—served to instruct and shape public culture in nineteenth-century America. We will never know if Eakins, as a man, committed acts that deserve our censure. It is undeniable that Eakins, as an artist, is still a force to be reckoned with.