Professor Henry A. Rowland

IN 1887 EAKINS’ friend the Philadelphia journalist Talcott Williams took him to meet Walt Whitman at Whitman’s house in Camden...

From the beginning of Thomas Eakins’ career in the early 1870s to the present, critics and scholars have consistently remarked on the “manly” nature of the artist’s works, but never have the masculine qualities of the paintings been explained. In...

Sometime between 1883 and 1885, a colleague photographed Thomas Eakins unclothed and holding aloft a naked female student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (fig. 1). In recent decades, this image has been tendered as the most tangible proof of the artist’s indiscretions. Although the scene undoubtedly is worthy of critique, it also is worth noting that Eakins hardly was the first indiscreet Philadelphian. More than a century before that shutter snapped, Charles Willson Peale sketched …