Preface

Johns, Elizabeth

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Preface

Elizabeth Johns

Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life

THIS STUDY examines Thomas Eakins in the cultural context of his era, late nineteenth-century America...

Author

Elizabeth Johns

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23368

Preface

This study examines Thomas Eakins in the cultural context of his era, late nineteenth-century America. Of the many themes that informed that rich era, several illuminate Eakins’ career so clearly as to place him—and his achievement—in a bright light. I will set them forth in this study.

My approach is a new one for Eakins scholarship (although certainly not for art historical studies in general). Previous scholars have focused on Eakins’ style and on his unhappy relationship with some of his fellow Philadelphians, particularly those connected with the institutional stronghold of art in the city, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Motivating my own study of Eakins is the conviction that my predecessors, fine as their studies were, did not give sufficient weight to several crucial points about Eakins’ career. Important among these is the fact that Eakins had an income from his father and could paint what was significant to him. From his earliest years, he painted almost nothing but portraits.1Works that are not portraits in the usual sense are Eakins’ sailing and hunting scenes (although these are more properly scenes of an admired activity than a landscape or a seascape); his scenes in the 1880s of the shore and meadows near Gloucester, N.J.; The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, 1879 (Philadelphia Museum of Art); and The Crucifixion, 1880 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Generally, however, Eakins thought of even his sporting scenes as portraits, for he wrote to his friend Earl Shinn that the watercolor and oil A Negro Whistling Plover, 1874 (watercolor, Brooklyn Museum; oil, now lost) portrayed William Robinson of Backneck, and that the watercolor Baseball Players Practising, 1875 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) was a portrait of members of the Philadelphia baseball team, the Athletics (Eakins to Shinn, January 30, 1875, Cadbury Collection, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College). No more than twenty-five of these portraits (the whole body of which involved over two hundred sitters and subjects) were commissioned. For all of the others, it was Eakins who took the initiative and secured the participation of his sitters. And although his portraits offended so many of his sitters that the rejected paintings now comprise large museum holdings, particularly in Philadelphia, year after year prominent people made the climb to Eakins’ fourth-floor studio and sat through his arduous requirements for sittings. These factors have fundamental importance in assessing what painting meant to Eakins, and what his convictions meant in his time.

In addition to Eakins’ extraordinary interest in the portrait, another point seemed to me to warrant deeper attention, and that was his technique. Generally, scholars have called Eakins an “objective realist” who painted “what he saw” rather than what he imagined, and who believed his responsibility to lie in measurement and accuracy rather than allusion. In contrast, I find that his canvases are only in some areas minutely measured and “objectively” painted; in almost every work there are large areas in which his technique is free, experimental, and sometimes even deliberately clumsy. Such variety in technique calls for greater recognition and interpretation.

Thus I began my own study of Eakins with these two questions: Why did Eakins paint what he painted? Why did he paint the way that he did?

I have focused my resulting discussion on five major paintings rather than on Eakins’ entire body of work. After an introductory chapter in which I set forth the contexts of nineteenth-century modernity, heroic ideals, and portraiture that influenced Eakins, I develop these themes in five chapters keyed to single paintings: Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, The Gross Clinic, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, The Concert Singer, and Walt Whitman. These chapters are focal points in a study that is chronological and cumulative.

The complex culture in which Eakins lived and worked can be analyzed from several points of view. I have chosen to take the viewpoint of geography—of Philadelphia and of Paris, against a background of concerns shared across America and Europe; of time—of Eakins’ era specifically but also of the decades of the nineteenth century that preceded him; and of the values and aspirations of the people who attracted Eakins as sitters—people who wrote, made music, practiced medicine, worked in scientific laboratories, enjoyed the outdoors, and painted. In order to keep Eakins at the center of the study, I have presented in detail only some of the contextual discussions; in others, where I have judged that the material is more widely known, I have generalized.

My objective throughout has been to discuss what drew me to Eakins originally: to establish the experience within which Eakins chose his subjects and to characterize the convictions with which he painted them in his own way.

1 Works that are not portraits in the usual sense are Eakins’ sailing and hunting scenes (although these are more properly scenes of an admired activity than a landscape or a seascape); his scenes in the 1880s of the shore and meadows near Gloucester, N.J.; The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, 1879 (Philadelphia Museum of Art); and The Crucifixion, 1880 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Generally, however, Eakins thought of even his sporting scenes as portraits, for he wrote to his friend Earl Shinn that the watercolor and oil A Negro Whistling Plover, 1874 (watercolor, Brooklyn Museum; oil, now lost) portrayed William Robinson of Backneck, and that the watercolor Baseball Players Practising, 1875 (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) was a portrait of members of the Philadelphia baseball team, the Athletics (Eakins to Shinn, January 30, 1875, Cadbury Collection, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College). »

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